Passengers

JOHN SCHABEL

“John Schabel’s series of photographs depicting anonymous airline passengers effectively captures the curious blend of impersonal efficiency and poignant humanity that pervades the experience of contemporary commercial air travel. Like products on an assembly line, the planes carrying Schabel’s subjects churn down the runway; and with the same regularity the individual passengers emerge, identically framed, from his camera and onto the gallery wall. Interestingly, it is precisely this mechanized process that lays bare the active, but often overlooked, emotional and intellectual relationship between human beings and flight.”  — Laura M. Andre

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Loverboy), 1989. Blue fabric and hanging device, dimensions vary with installation. View of Felix Gonzalez-Torres: This Place, Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2015–16. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.