John Schabel's Passengers

If all goes well, I'll be one of those today.

From the NC Museum of Art website: "John Schabel's Untitled (Passengers) is a series of black-and-white photographs of air travelers ... outside the airplanes still on the runway. His fascination, Schabel says, grew out of that moment when passengers are powerless to do anything but wait for takeoff. He likes best views that present unclear situations, such as those obscured by rain. He made the Passengers photographs at night, when he could see travelers in the planes’ interior lights but they could not see him.

“I think of the Passenger photographs as portraits,” he wrote. “The passenger is unaware and locked inside an airplane, and the photographer is maybe a hundred yards away in the dark. . . . I mean, that's what was fascinating to me about that situation with the person locked inside an airplane. . . . I think whatever the person in the window is feeling is not necessarily captured in the photograph, but what the viewer brings to it is maybe their own feeling of that familiar situation.”