This Beautiful Moment of Ours

After I was vaccinated against Covid in March 2021, I road the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) subway and elevated trains almost daily; sometimes with a destination in mind, sometimes without. I carried a point-and-shoot camera to be inconspicuous. Although I occasionally photographed people in the car, for the most part, I either aimed out the window or walked along the platform palming my camera. Over a six-month period, I accumulated well over 200,000 images--all but 500 or so long ago deleted. To deal with the train's speed, I used camera presets that evolved over the time. I took full advantage of the camera's continuous multi-shot capabilities. Consequently, I often did not know what I had captured until I reviewed the images at home. At first, I was intrigued by the randomness, but I quickly realized that the process of culling the results imposed order on what had been chance. Nine of the 10 images in this sequence are from my rides during Covid. One is from my pre-Covid travels, when I first photographed on CTA trains. While this project was never intended to be about the emergence from lockdown, a significant portion of it coincided with that adaptation. At some point, I no longer saw the masks, only the personalities. Many of the images pose questions, but only the people on the platforms or in the cars know the answers.