Passengers

Passengers gathers photographs Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer made at a bus station at night while travelling through Poland, of riders seen through the ice-covered windows of an idling coach.

Fogged, stained and lit only by the station's pale lamps, the windows turn each passenger into something closer to a painted figure than a photographic subject — faces softened by condensation, expressions read as melancholy or unguarded joy, distance and intimacy held in the same frame. The book collects 114 colour photographs from the series across 164 pages, published by Spector Books in Leipzig as a clothbound hardcover with dust jacket.

Keller and Wittwer are a Swiss artist duo working primarily in photography and video, frequently focused on transit and waiting — bus stations, airports, the spaces where people are briefly held between destinations. Passengers was followed by a related book, Point de Départ, which turned the same method on commuters boarding buses in Paris.