hands in motion
On a daily basis, workers, students, the elderly, and other civilians sit—often silently—in crowded wagons, underground trains, and buses, travelling from one urban space to another. My public transport photo project began inside a bus in Athens in July 2005. Using only my mobile phone, I started observing the body language of passengers as they moved through these in-between spaces.
Public transport offers something rare: time. Time to witness. Time to notice the quiet language of hands—resting, gripping, folded, or reaching. These hands became the vital component of a moving archive that documents the fragile choreography of modern urban life: race, age, class, migration, stillness, exhaustion, interruption, and alertness. All of it belongs to the ecology of transit.
The hands reveal what the faces often conceal. They speak without words. Like a theatre director shaping the gestures of actors, I found myself drawn to the unspoken drama of motionless theatricality—the eloquence of passengers who remain unknown, unnamed, but deeply present. In these images, the everyday becomes poetic, and the ordinary becomes a stage for stories we often overlook.
