The Architecture of Passing Through

I remember sitting on a slow-moving train in the north of England, watching the countryside stutter past the glass. An elderly woman sat opposite me, her forehead pressed against the pane, tracing the movement of the hedgerows with her eyes. She didn’t look at me once, and I didn’t look at her. We were two separate lives contained within the same rattling metal box, both of us suspended in that strange, liminal space where you are neither here nor there. It is a peculiar kind of solitude, being in transit. You are a ghost to the world outside, a fleeting silhouette passing through their fields and villages, while they are merely a series of static postcards flickering past your own window. We spend so much of our lives looking out at the world through layers of separation, wondering if the people on the other side of the glass are looking back, or if they even notice the train as it cuts through their afternoon. Do we ever truly touch the places we pass through, or are we just watching them from a distance?

Mohammad Saiful Islam has captured this exact feeling of layered existence in his work titled Frames within the Frame. It perfectly illustrates how we move through the world, always observing from behind our own private barriers. Does this image remind you of a journey where you felt like a spectator to your own life?