Joshua Hammer profiles the photographer and video artist Adam Magyar, who creates stunning panoramas of urban life:
In a growing body of photographic and video art done over the past decade, Magyar bends conventional representations of time and space, stretching milliseconds into minutes, freezing moments with a resolution that the naked eye could never have perceived. His art evokes such variegated sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, even the 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. The images – sleek silver subway cars, solemn commuters lost in private worlds – are beautiful and elegant, but also produce feelings of disquiet. “These moments I capture are meaningless, there is no story in them, and if you can catch the core, the essence of being, you capture probably everything,” Magyar says in one of the many cryptic comments about his work that reflect both their hypnotic appeal and their elusiveness. There is a sense of stepping into a different dimension, of inhabiting a space between stillness and movement, a time-warp world where the rules of physics don’t apply.
The above video is from Magyar’s Stainless series, which captures fast-moving subway trains and waiting straphangers:
Magyar shot the footage at 56 times normal speed, turning 12-second blurs into nearly 12-minute films of excruciating slowness. His commuters stand, together yet apart, with the studied, three-dimensional grace of statues – only the twitch of a lip or a finger drawn toward an iPhone indicating that these people were caught in hyper-slow motion, inhabiting an elongated moment. Magyar extracts drama from an infinitesimal flash of time. “I want to capture something that happens in milliseconds, something that you don’t even realize took place,” he told me. “I’m extending the moments – the present, the now – because as humans we live only in the past and the future. But the only existence we have is now, and that is something that we don’t even consider.”
The Dish 