Einstein’s Camera
Tags: Long Reads, Culture

“You start paying attention to how these people interact with their technology, and how they barely interact with each other,” says Hannah Frieser, the former director of Light Work. Yet the eerie images can also be seen as a celebration of the human community, something that Magyar grew increasingly to appreciate as he traveled the world. The straphangers he captured in Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, and Berlin manifest striking similarities in appearance, expression, and attitude that transcend cultural and geographical differences. In her catalog notes for the show, Frieser drew a clear distinction between the street photography practiced by masters such as Diane Arbus, Gary Winograd, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Magyar’s kind of image-making. “The life that he chronicles is made up of everyday people, not the most beautiful, eccentric, and destitute who typically draw the attention of photographers,” she wrote. “They looked for differences whereas Magyar ascertains similarities. They kept moving through the city, while Magyar remains stationary and waits for people to move past his camera … He jumps to different cities in various countries and continents until the commonalities within mankind begin to emerge.”

The Stainless photos also offered the most telling example of Magyar’s relentless perfectionism. (Pictured above, Stainless #7649 New York) Magyar desperately wanted to shoot in the tunnels of Tokyo—“the ultimate subway system, the ultimate urban environment” —but a subtle flicker in the lighting produced over-exposed and under-exposed frames that appeared on his images as vertical lines. Magyar’s solution: He rode the subways for a week with his light meter, taking readings at all 290 stations in the network. “I found five stations with high-frequency light, so I could start working there,” he recalls. “But inside the train the light was still bad, so I spent three months making the software to get rid of those lines.” Magyar also faced another problem after his tripod was banned from the New York City subway system. He was obliged to use a hand-held camera, which resulted in further distortions on his images; several weeks were taken up devising more code to eliminate them. Lars Torkuhl, the German design engineer, compares him to a Zen Buddhist master. “In Zen you can train for five years before you shoot a bow and arrow. And that describes exactly what he does,” Torkuhl told me. “Time doesn’t exist for him. He lives and executes his work in a crisp, detailed manner, exactly like his pictures.”

A close-up from Stainless #7649

Shortly after completing Stainless, Magyar began to consider transitioning to moving images. After months of research, he persuaded the German manufacturer Optronis to lend him one of its $16,000, high-performance industrial video cameras—used in crash tests and robotic-arm studies, and even for analyzing the hind hooves of show-jumping horses. With a high level of light sensitivity and advanced TimeBench analysis software, the Optronis shoots high-resolution images at astonishing speeds: up to 100,000 frames per second, compared to 24 frames per second in a traditional film camera.

Magyar turned the concept of Stainless on its head: Instead of standing on a platform shooting passengers speeding past him, Magyar now positioned himself inside the moving subway car, recording stationary commuters on the platform as train and camera rolled into the station. Again, the ghost of Einstein permeates these images, and again, he was warping time: Magyar shot the footage at 56 times normal speed, turning 12-second blurs into nearly 12-minute films of excruciating slowness. His commuters stand, together yet apart, with the studied, three-dimensional grace of statues—only the twitch of a lip or a finger drawn toward an iPhone indicating that these people were caught in hyper-slow motion, inhabiting an elongated moment. Magyar extracts drama from an infinitesimal flash of time. “I want to capture something that happens in milliseconds, something that you don’t even realize took place,” he told me. “I’m extending the moments—the present, the now—because as humans we live only in the past and the future. But the only existence we have is now, and that is something that we don’t even consider.”

The breathtaking clarity of the Stainless videos is also the result of the most challenging software code he has ever had to write. In his experiments with industrial cameras, Magyar found that the image quality was ideal for measuring speed, distance, and volume, but not entirely suitable for the demands of an artist. He wrote complex programs to improve the quality of images shot in conditions of low lighting and poor contrast. Another problem was image noise—columns, rows, lines, and other random distortions, a typical issue with high-sensitivity digital sensors. He spent nearly two years, on and off, developing noise-reduction software, solving one problem only to confront a new one. “The engineers don’t have to deal with this, but I do. I cannot sleep. I’m working on this for months, and I don’t stop. You find a new problem, and you have to find a solution.”

A couple of mornings after our first encounter, I arrange to meet Magyar at Alexanderplatz, one of Berlin’s busiest subway stations, for a demonstration of the Stainless project. I arrive at the height of rush hour, and wait for ten minutes at one end of the crowded platform before he appears. His long hair spills over his black parka, which is matched by black work boots, black jeans, and a black daypack. Inside the pack, Magyar carries his customized Optronis video camera and a laptop. Four cables, blue and black, poke out of the bag. He says the bulky apparatus makes him feel like “the guy from Ghostbusters.” After his run-in with the police at Union Station, Magyar adapted his equipment so that he can conceal it inside a backpack, but to my eye the new setup seems likely to raise even more suspicions.

Six aboveground lines (S Bahn) and three underground lines (U Bahn) converge at Alexanderplatz, creating a constant flow of traffic throughout the morning. “I am looking for a situation where there is no gap, the more people the better,” he tells me. “There are only a couple of spots in every city that can provide that sort of crowd, and this is one of them.”

Magyar and I hop on the U2 and travel one stop to Rosa Luxemburg Platz, then cross the platform and catch the next train heading back to Alexanderplatz. In the crowded car Magyar fishes the apparatus out of his backpack. The gray aluminum camera body, adapted with viewfinder, hand grip, and cables that connect the device to his laptop and battery back, looks like a prototype cobbled together in a backyard garage. Red and green lights blink as he aims the lens through the window “I’m always getting asked, ‘Did you make this yourself?’” he tells me, as commuters gape in curiosity. Minutes later, we rumble into the station, and Magyar begins taping. It is all over in twelve seconds.

We stand and wait four minutes while the eight gigabytes of new data download to his laptop. (During his road trips he typically carries two hard drives that together can store three terabytes.) Magyar studies the procession of beautifully lit faces that he has extracted from the twelve-second blur, and pronounces himself satisfied. He shoots hundreds of hours of video to obtain the results he wants; one of his favorites in the series, shot in 2011 at Alexanderplatz (see video), serendipitously captures, in the background, two little girls loping along the platform. Their graceful movements contrast with the stillness of the commuters in the foreground—a jolting reminder that the image one is witnessing is not a photo, but a stretched-out moment—what Magyar calls “in-between time.” “Those girls were a real gift to me,” he says.