STATION TO STATION
駅から駅まで
Station zu Station
Állomás állomáshoz
स्टेशन से स्टेशन
Station à Station
“Here are we, one magical moment/
Such is the stuff, from where dreams are woven”
- David Bowie
WORDS AND PHOTOS BY NUSRAT DURRANI
The New York City subway is a wondrous place. From one stop to another, in the F train or the A, C, E, the subway’s ephemeral connections, shared humanity and inarticulate, forced companionships are an essential part of living in the greatest city in the world. Whether you boarded at High Street in Brooklyn or changed at Bleecker for the 6 to Grand Central, or you had the entire Q to yourself on a dark and rainy night, our subway is living poetry. Its darkness, brokenness and unreliability, its wildly varied humanity flocked together in rough acceptance of everything/anything to make it in NYC.
The subway’s mad, itinerant trains and friendly-ghost conductors, its slow-motion cops, hungry musicians and jingle-jangle beggars, derelicts, junkies and actors, maniacal students and obsessive moms are characters in a stream of consciousness film. Every ride, every stop is an act in the theatre of life- exhilaration, despair, sorrow and triumph lived in the narrative arc of a commute.
I have been making pictures in the NYC subway for ten years. Images hurtle through my mind: doors opening and closing; the rattle and hum and music and tongues; the stench of urine and the scurrying rats the size of cats; the deep gothic ambience of the underground. Editing a decade’s worth of metal rides, I flipped through slices of time frozen in a poetic pastiche. Hundreds of journeys in the comfort of beautiful strangers. I remember every single one of them and the crowded, lonely togetherness we shared in the trains.