October. It’s getting colder and darker. Every morning we’re less likely to see daylight as we emerge from the subway. We look back on Passengers by Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer, the winner of the Dummy Award, which recognizes the best book layout, at the last FotoBook Festival.
In the Winter of 2010, the German-Swiss duo, who had planned to use their residency in Poland to document Soviet Socialist architecture, discovered something else: a bus station in Kielce. Looking through the frozen glass windows, both photographers starting framing their shots of the passengers, cloaked in fog, as they waited for their buses to leave.
I’m not sure who has better captured these latent moments of the snow-capped coma that is a winter morning. None of these passengers has fully chosen between dreaming and waking, and the buses rolling along Poland’s roads must prolong this indecision. The portraits of Keller & Wittwer, their frames like comic book cells, have a power as evocative as cinema. We see in the eyes of their passengers, uncertain and half-closed, the inside, and elsewhere.
Antoine Soubrier
Passengers, by Dagmar Keller & Martin Wittwer.
The book will be published next year, by Seltmann&Söhne, partner of the Dummy Award.
