Wait for Walk
I’ve talked before here about the curious pleasure of watching people in Copenhagen wait for the “walk man” to change from red to green.
I find I am not alone in my interest, and now Florian Bohm, a German photographer who lives in New York and Munich, has an exhibition (at Cohen Amador) and book called “Wait for Walk,” which, as the announcement puts it, captures the fleeting moments in which “the nonstop pulse of the city comes to a standstill for a brief moment.” The photographer, it is noted, waits for gaps in the passing traffic to take his shots, “so that the flow of traffic becomes the shutter curtain.”
His city of choice is New York (though Munich, where I found fairly rigorous adherence to signals, presents an interesting point of comparison), where it can of course be a challenge to find pedestrians actually waiting at the light. One of the things I enjoyed particularly about the work is the way the geographical location of the intersection determines the tenor of the pedestrians, whether hurried business types checking their Blackberries, or shorts-clad tourists holding shopping bags and looking at the buildings and people that surround them. They also evoke Walker Evans’ famous subway photographs, which, thanks to his anonymous coat-concealed camera, captured Depression-era New Yorkers in an unguarded public moment. In Bohm’s photographs we see people yawning, pointing, preening, scratching, exhaling, smiling, or just absently staring into space, the city “holding its breath for a moment,” as the text notes. I’ve sometimes thought of traffic signals in this regard as punctuation, providing a moment’s repose in the run-on sentences of daily life.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Etc., Pedestrians, Traffic Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 17th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Looking at that picture I shudder. I’m a paranoid pessimist. (I’ve been a software developer for just about thirty years.) Given a choice I wait for a light behind a traffic pole or other substantial object from the viewpoint of the traffic closest to the curb. The few times I’ve taken a bus recently I stand behind the tree at the one location.
The idea being that a drunk, or a person on a cell phone or texting, who loses control of their vehicle will hit the substantial object first.
Now the chances of this happening are extremely slight. On the other hand this only takes me a few seconds and I do it without thinking now.
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:51 am
It is also interesting if we put the antrophological´s suit and going out to do field work. This psychological aspect is perhaps known by Tom but pedestrian´s behaviour is imitative and “classist”. People (pedestrians) of the same condition (clothes, physical appearence…) tend to imitate the crossing behaviour of others who are similar to them. Of course, this has implications for traffic safety and pedestrian attitudes in the road.
Reference:
Lefkowitz, M., Blake, R. R., & Mouton, J. S. (1955). Status factors in pedestrian violation of traffic signals. J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 1955, 51, 704-705
A good blog for those who has motor vehicles, but what about the next book for those who don´t, say, pedestrians like me. I look forward for it.