Josh Melnick’s The 8 Train, showing now in the 6th floor Art In General space on Walker Street, invites you to transgress the first rule of subway riding by beckoning you to stare, long and hard, at the faces that flitter in and out of your vision, half-seen, through the haze of your daily commute. What at first glance seems to be a series of portraits projected onto four screens is, in fact, a series of super-slow motion videos, each depicting, in black and white, a solitary subway rider’s face.

“I chose the subway because it is a place which is both public and private, a place where people are in close proximity but not necessarily close,” says Melnick. “It’s also a great place for dreaming, for being rocked into a trance, and for making up stories about all the faces you see.”

Melnick and cinematographer Max Goldman spent over a week riding every subway line, looking at and photographing hundreds of people. The subterranean world they’ve created uses a documentary-style realism to invoke a fantasy world – the title, 8 Train, references the idea of potential, chosen both because it is a line that doesn’t exist and because it invokes the infinite. The images were captured with a two-second pan of a camera shooting at 1,300 frames per second; on-screen, those two seconds are stretched out over more than three minutes, with the result that no detail is lost. The overall effect is mesmerizing. A blink, an eyeball movement, a twitch: when elongated in time, these involuntary acts come to seem purposeful. The background is haunted by flickering lights and passing trains that move faster than the faces but slower than they should. The faces of these anonymous subway riders are randomized onto the exhibit’s four screens: a procession of faces of all types, each one afflicted with his or her own strain of subway malaise.

“Though everyone looks at one another in the subway, no one can actually stare – as soon as eye contact is made, you have to look away,” says Melnick. “In many ways this project was about giving us the opportunity to really stare at another person; to look deeply at them. To stare so long that we become aware of our own process of looking. The project is not about how we look at people in public places specifically. It’s about how we look at people in general.”

Through deconstructing our own looking, the work succeeds. Melnick takes those fragmentary glances, those two seconds we steal when we look up from our reading, and freezes them, drawing them out for what feels like an eternity and inviting us to revel in those snatches of voyeurism. In revealing every micro-expression – each tic, each blink, is operatic – the portraits show us all that we fail to see in those two seconds. They invite us to dissect those fleeting glances and, perhaps, restore some humanity to our daily commute.

‘The 8 Train’ – Art in General, 79 Walker Street, 6th Floor. Through July 18th.


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Tim is a freelance journalist based in New York and a correspondent for Outside Magazine. Recent stories have taken him from New Guinea to Alaska and from BASE-jumping lessons to the Navy SEALs obstacle course. He lives in Brooklyn.

Between the gushing reviews of a new urban space and glorious pictures of pedestrian packed streets, it’s easy to forget that the city’s “Greenlight for Midtown” program was primarily billed as a way to reduce traffic congestion throughout Manhattan by the most counter-intuitive means: taking away space from cars.

Although induced demand and its inverse, sometimes called “traffic shrinkage,” have become pretty well accepted in transportation-planning circles, to have a concrete (and beach chair-filled) example of it at the crossroads of the world is an obvious boon for those who wish to make the case that closing streets to cars, rationalizing intersections and improving the pedestrian environment can be a sensible solution to vehicle congestion.

Broadway’s angular scramble from 72nd Street to Union Square has been an ink stain on the crisp, angular and pen filled breast pocket of Manhattan traffic engineers for decades. It cuts across the Avenues making odd intersections and forcing strange signal patterns, as well as drawing peripheral traffic into the city’s core. Nowhere was this more obvious than Herald Square and Times Square, precisely where the City has redesigned Broadway.

Although the Transportation Department won’t release a comprehensive traffic analysis for sometime, anecdotal evidence suggests that the redesign has been a success, not only in its much-lauded efforts to give pedestrians a bit more breathing room, but also as a counter-intuitive traffic curative for all the world to see.


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Graham T. Beck is a writer and a critic based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He rides a bike to work.