Passengers

John Schabel's Passengers collects black-and-white photographs of airline travelers photographed unaware through the windows of departing planes, each face caught alone with itself in the last moments before takeoff.

Working with a long telephoto lens from the tarmac in the early 1990s, Schabel photographed passengers through the scratched, rain-streaked oval windows of parked aircraft, compressing distance until the glass itself becomes part of the image. The resulting portraits are soft, granular and voyeuristic: strangers caught mid-thought, unaware of the camera, their expressions ranging from boredom to apprehension. Sequenced without captions or names, the book reads as a single sustained meditation on air travel as a modern rite of passage, stripped of glamour and reduced to the isolation of the individual seat.

Schabel is an American photographer whose work has long focused on surveillance, distance and the unguarded moment. Passengers remains his best-known body of work, exhibited internationally and cited as an influence on subsequent photographers working with telephoto observation and the ethics of the candid portrait.