TRONIE IN TRANSIT

One late afternoon in October, during the European autumn, I was travelling back to my hotel in Brussels after visiting the Atomium. While making a brief stop at Stuyvenbergh, a Brussels Metro Station on line 6, I noticed groups of terracotta statues on the edges of the platform walls. Although the metro train started moving, I reached out for my camera and tried to capture what I saw through the window. Only a week later, when I was back home in South Africa and downloading the images onto my laptop, I discovered the reflection of a young woman in the window. The title, 'Tronie', comes from the Dutch word for 'face', and was chosen to represent the anonymous reflection, as opposed to the recognised. 'Tronie' refers to a form of Dutch Golden Age and Flemish painting that depicts a characteristic facial expression. 'A Tronie in Transit' suggests that this is one among potentially many tronies travelling to their distinctive destinations, and it might imply a more individualised focus on the subject of the photograph. 'In transit ' implies a dynamic quality, capturing a moment of change, motion, or progression within the context of time and space.