How do you make a portrait of somebody you don´t know, in the hustle of a busy station hall, with people rushing to and from the platforms?
For these Urgent Portraits in the Central Station of Amsterdam, the challenge was to go beyond the fact of photographing strangers, in an attempt to explore that spark between the photographer and the subject; the moment “brief as the blink of an eye”, but substantial enough to echo his own anonymity in every portrait.
Being a portrait a consensual process that relies on the subject´s agreement to be photographed, Urgent Portraits explores the contract between the subject and the agreed-upon distance that hangs in the air that separates them. Urgent Portraits is about the challenge of getting these strangers to slow down, put their handbag on the ground and pose, before they disappear in the crowd of the station hall. Nevertheless, the subjects remain strangers. Their unknown faces just pass by, like when we run into them in our own daily rush.