As a Danish transplant living in New York, photographer Peter Funch began creating a series of panoramic, composite images on the streets of his adopted city in 2006. The result is his project Babel Tales Redux, now on display at the V1 Gallery in New York. The 40 photographs represent a five-year meditation on human behavior, coincidence, repetition and the interstitial area between fiction and reality.
Like winter’s first snow, the annual photobook listmania has settled across the land once again. One listed title which caught my eye was Jeff Mermelstein’s 2019 favorite, The Imperfect Atlas by Peter Funch.
For years, the Danish photographer watched commuters near Grand Central Terminal, spotting the same figures, gestures and expressions, again and again.
It’s not that hard to go out into the street and take a stranger’s picture. It is legal and, with the right equipment, technically simple. But how do you arrive at two pictures of the same person, with almost the same expression, on what seem to be different days? These photographs were made by the Danish artist Peter Funch, and they are part of a series of many such pairs. For nine years, from 2007 until 2016, Funch hung around Grand Central Terminal and watched commuters during the morning rush between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. Using a long-lensed digital camera, he made countless portraits, an intriguing face here, another one there, yet another over there. He began to notice repetitions, the same people, the same faces, the same gestures, the same clothes. Each person was in the self-enclosed reverie of getting somewhere. The photos were all taken in May, June or July, in bright summer sunshine. The resulting project, published last year in a monograph titled “42nd and Vanderbilt,” is named for the street corner on which Funch stationed himself. It contains dozens of pairs of portraits (and a few in sequences of three), all of strangers.
Danish photographer Peter Funch stakes New York City street corners out for two weeks at a time, taking pictures of passersby from the very same spot. He then uses Photoshop to composite the results into single images.
