MAX FARAGO

Bus Stop, Buenos Aires, 2016

LA-based Max Farago makes work that is equally strong in colour and black-and-white, and is alert to the way that composition and formal correspondences in a photograph can lend beauty or a sense of soulfulness to the everyday. His use of light recalls some of the more bleached-out works of itinerant American photographer Garry Winogrand, who talked of photography in the simplest of terms – as catching “light on surface”. What could be more elegant? Farago’s portrait of a woman waiting at a bus stop in Buenos Aires isn’t radical in its subject matter – actually the waiting passenger is a trope of street or documentary photography ( think of Ir ish photographer Tom Wood’s Bus Odyssey, for example) – but the picture is nevertheless startling in its emotional power. Poised between movements, t he woman appears lost in thought. There is a correspondence between her stillness and the frozen movement of the man walking on the pavement across the street, as well as the bus driving away. Elegance in a person perhaps involves a sense of containment, of preparation, poise and measure. This woman appears supremely elegant despite the ordinariness of her surroundings. Farago says: “I am more interested in elegance as it pertains to behaviour. How someone handles a situation. Not about what someone is w earing or how their house is decorated.

It is about dignity and also about flexibility. Being able to adapt to situations in a meaningful and decent manner. But I guess that elegance as it pertains to image is similar. It is about neither too much nor too little. About the balance of things. The way the world can hold a mirror up to itself when framed with intentionality and humility. Letting things be .”