ANA BERNSTEIN  PHOTOGRAPHY

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The Mechanic of Fluids is a project of experimentation with photographic language exploring a visuality proper to the rhythm of the city. The images created by means of horizontal panoramic shots and medium to long duration exposure highlight the plastic features of the photographic still, such as movement, color, and composition lines, and seek to poetically express the experience of the in-between, of the permanent displacement and the de-individualization characteristic of current times.

Done at Grand Central Station in New York City, where nearly 750.000 people pass through everyday, the photographic essay registers the fluxes and counter-fluxes of a mass that is in permanent movement, always coming and going. Rushed, tired, worried, or simply distracted, amid tidbits of conversation, music and announcements of train platforms changes, people move through the Grand Central paying no attention to the station or fellow commuters, in this place that is neither here nor there, but the in-between of one's destination and some other place. There is a state of suspension, of mediation, visually manifested in the way matter seems to dissolve and light and color project themselves, in the floating of bodies, in the contours that fade and disappear. In these almost abstract images, we occasionally glimpse fragments of emotions and affects, of precarious individualities.