I stumbled across this link to an amazing project by Adam Magyar, and other than being both eerie and beautiful, what he does made me think about how we all live together. About how we tolerate each other, and about how we make ourselves tolerable to each other.
Oddly, it seems to be of paramount importance that we fend off others, rather than attract them. So we each build our own bubbles to keep others of our species away. Even in a lift going between two floors, there’s a posture and an attitude that screams, “Leave me alone, do not talk to me, don’t even look my way.”
If you were a dog, you would probably be able to smell it.
As someone who has spent his working life in advertising, it makes me smile (on the inside, because you can’t smile in the lift). Here we are as a communications collective with the single goal of making the general populace to buy stuff to make them each more appealing to others. Shampoo to make your hair shinier, deodorant so that you don’t smell. Toothpaste to stop knocking others out with your breath. Gyms to make you slimmer. Shoes to make you taller. Clothes to make you slinkier. Watches, jewellery, spectacles to make you look richer than you are. Cars, whose keys, once slung onto the boardroom table, become more important than the car itself.
Of course, there’s the obverse. Pre-torn jeans rolled up over the ankles, shoes without socks, tatts and body piercings, the rebellion of giant hipster beards. But, sorry for you lot as well, they’ve all been sold to you in some way or another as a way to make a statement, as a way to make yourself more interesting to your own little subset of people.
So why do we all behave the same way when we’re in a confined space? Whether we wear Hublot and Versace, or the slightly soiled articles from antique clothing stores, I’m starting to think that we’re more concerned with repelling others than inviting them closer.
Whether we’re about to travel business class to Paris, or waiting to catch the evening bus to Thornton, we each raise defences of expression and body language to warn others to keep their distance. We reinforce this with accessories that announce that our interior worlds are inassailable – iPods, tablets, laptops, sunglasses, cellphones, newspapers. A strange dichotomy: money and effort spent to make a statement; behaviour crafted carefully to deny any challenges made to it.
We've learnt to carry our picket fences around with us.
I’d never seen this more apparently than in Adam Magyar’s work. His look at everyday people is so intimate that he may has well have shot them having sex, or on the toilet. You can’t really stare at people in that way on the way to the fourth floor or on on the red-eye to Jo’burg. But his camera does it for us, and the glimpse over the picket fence is more than a little disturbing.
It's pretty much what writers do, I guess. But we writers are sneaky little squirrels - we stuff those observations into our cheeks to spit out and embellish upon later, in private, and censor or exaggerate what we think we've seen for our own purposes.
Yes, there’s the astonishing technical aspect to what Magyar does. But what got me was the human aspect. The full-frontal look into people doing nothing more special than waiting for a train, and what those carefully-guarded faces begin to reveal once you have the luxury of really looking at them.
I suppose everyone we ever see – or think we see – is fighting a battle the rest of us know nothing about.
See more of Adam Magyar’s work here.
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