When Humans Leave (Empty Spaces)
Sometimes you end up in an empty space that is normally bustling with life. It's unusual, it's eerie, and it hints at what happens after humans leave and don't return. Sometimes you play a trick to get that feel.
This post contains two sets of photos: one taken along the M2 metro line in Milan, and the other in the low-cost terminal at Budapest Airport. In both sets, the hour goes late, and people are elsewhere.
Most of the time, we go to these places when it's crowded and full of life. And when they are empty, it simply doesn't feel normal. Have people left for good? Will anyone ever return? The lights are still on, the machines still work, and there is no knowing whether this is abandonment or normal rhythm.
There are other places that are falling – or have fallen – to ruin. Buildings, streets, cities, roads once used and kept up by humans, now being taken back by nature. Those places are obvious. The ones that have just been left aren't.
As a photographer, sometimes you want to catch a scene without people when there are people there. Maybe to show it without human interference, maybe to be respectful of people's privacy: you want to publish the photo but you don't want to include anyone without their knowledge, not even inadvertently.
You wait. You zoom. You move the frame as much as it makes sense. You need to play a trick because you want to shut out the context, for whatever reason. Your camera helps by providing only a limited window to the complexity that is otherwise in front of you.
The scenes in this post are not really tricks. Apart from me setting my suitcase in the middle of an empty corridor, and then taking the shot. But people have already left these places for the night. At the airport, I was able to take these photos before a late night flight before my fellow passengers arrived at the gate.
The Milan metro photos were taken using a Canon EOS2000D, while the Budapest airport photos were snapped using an iPhone.
