Train People

Waiting for the train that will never come.

The stories that most photographs tell us are generally obvious and mundane but some beg for interpretation and sense. What is going on here? This is not some matronly woman with her shopping bag, walking home through the woods after a long day at her job as a hotel maid. But it could be. It could be anything you want. Photographs can tell whatever stories we decide to create for them, as we have long been reminded. The amount of words a picture is worth is in the eye of the beholder, and in this image there is much left to the imagination. The long, wishbone shaped object on the left is actually a pine needle and the woman is a less than an inch tall. She's a train lady, a tiny, injection-molded plastic figurine more commonly seen adding realism to model train sets. She appears to be standing on the threshold of some amazing new world, a through-the-looking-glass land of staggering proportions. She seems to possess an exasperated resolve to press on, despite the long overdue bus and her strange surroundings. Her slumped shoulders say this, the drooping belt of her raincoat. White stockings and a plastic grocery sack with a container of LoPlait, a LeanCuisine and a quart of 2% milk. The lonely spinster liberated from the late shift. A lunchroom lady who stepped through some wormhole and found herself lost in the Pleistocene epoch. That is the beauty of photographs. Or one of them. You fill in the blanks. Be it a plastic person or one of flesh and bone, their stories are unknown to us. But we're not very comfortable with the unknown or the unexplained. We create stories to protect ourselves from mystery. So Big Foot, the Bermuda Triangle and UFO's help us live with our fears and unanswered questions. But so do movies, novels and gods. We are master story-tellers. We have to be. Because life can be scary and overwhelming. It can get out of scale and become too big for us. But photography, the great artistic equalizer, puts the power of capturing and interpreting this life into the hands of us all. And it is that false sense of power and control which makes it so tantalizing. 

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