On the patience of platforms

A station teaches a particular kind of waiting — not idleness, not quite hope, but a stillness that keeps one eye on the board. I have been photographing that look for years without naming it, and lately I think it is the closest thing I have to a subject.

It is not the waiting of a queue, which is sociable and a little aggrieved. It is closer to the waiting of an animal in cover — the body still, the attention forward, the head tilted half a degree toward whatever might next arrive. In a station the next thing is almost always announced, and almost always late, and the small private theatre of will it / won’t it repeats every few minutes for everybody in the hall.

I find I am drawn to the people who keep their composure inside it. The man who lets his coat fall open without noticing. The woman with the bunch of flowers held a little too high. The boy whose feet have stopped fidgeting because his eyes have started to. They are not posing for me — they would, in fact, prefer that I was not there — but they are holding themselves, and the photograph is an attempt to honour that holding.

There is a longer thing I want to say about this and I do not yet know how to say it, which is why this is a note and not yet a Work.