Rian Dundon – Passenger

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

In Passenger photographer Rian Dundon offers a master class in high-impact mayhem as he assembles an edgy, take-no-prisoners, in-your-face collection of visual facts that riffs on people, places, forms, and feelings, including a generous serving of spleen.

Dundon is a passenger both literally and figuratively. He takes us with him on public transportation in his home town of Portland, Oregon, but we also ride along with him through his life and see what he sees. As he explains in his introductory text, transit is just a starting point for looking at the city. The book is by no means only about the city however. It is also about Dundon’s state of mind and point of view, an example of what critic Gerry Badger calls the “personal poetics of lived experience.”

Passenger is a large format book composed of a sequence of 88 full-bleed color photographs, one to a page. When you hold it open to look at it the experience is physical and immersive. You are right there in the picture. Dundon often shoots with flash, which gives the images a raw and dramatic look.

Dundon’s image pairings for the book’s forty-odd two-page spreads are notable, as he opts for maximum contrasts: flat and frontal versus a distanced perspective, person versus object, place versus closeup of shape, inside versus outside, portrait versus landscape orientation, and with different textures, compositions, and colors.

If you inventory the things Dundon photographs you come up with an impressive collection of seemingly random shots as well as repetition of a smaller number of similar subjects. The one-off pictures dominate but the themed photos anchor and frame.

In terms of themes there are a number of transit-related photos: bus stop shelters, signs, interiors of busses, maps, video displays, transit workers, and shots out the windows of moving busses. There are also plenty of images of freeways, bridges, overpasses, ramps, and traffic fences plus more than a few photos that include trash, litter, homeless camp detritus, and graffiti. Dundon pictures street people, youths in masks, protesters, and young Black men. Images of Dundon’s daughter and ex-wife provide a striking domestic counterpoint to all of this, however, an inside context that contrasts with the crazy messed-up world out there.

In addition to his themed photographs, Dundon goes full kitchen sink in terms of memorable things he vacuums up with his voracious eye –

the freezer section of a refrigerator filled with frozen meat,
a Porta-Potty on fire,
food laid out on a freeway overpass,
the back of a man in a hospital wearing a gown,
the interior of a smashed-up car,
a pair of dirty sneakers,
a closeup of a damaged AC venting grille,
someone’s bruised and swollen foot and ankle,
a CCTV security camera and video monitors,
a car or bus tire with snow chains,
an ivy-covered tree,
a person sprawled face-down on the pavement,
a preserved fetus in a jar,
young men praying in the street,
HVAC ducting and insulation in an attic,
discarded packaged food in a dumpster,
a chimpanzee,
a woman’s hand with long fake fingernails,
posters with fashion advertising,
flowers.

Such a long list of seemingly unrelated things begs the question of how you connect the dots and make meaning of the book. Besides the photographs being related by time and place and style, the answer, I think, is that you do not have to figure everything out. You can just go along and enjoy the ride, marveling at the astonishing inventiveness of Dundon’s virtuoso visual improvisation.

Since it would be presumptuous to declare Passenger a masterpiece, I will at least mention that for me it was a “before-and-after” book, the kind that permanently re-arranges your mental landscape. Packaged like a high-end fashion magazine but edited like a zine, it shows what can go right when photos and form fuse into a book.

Hans Hickerson, Associate Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Rian Dundon – Passenger

Photographer: Rian Dundon (born 1980, lives in Portland)

Publisher: Mirrorical Books 2024

Language: English

Design: Rian Dundon and Tod Lippy

Perfect-bound book with Smyth-sewn signatures, 14 x 8.5 inches, 96 pages, 88 color photographs, ISBN 979-8-9882645-3-8

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.