Sasha Patkin: Moor Eeffoc

Perhaps because I am a student at a rural college upstate and an outsider to the city, I often find being in the NYC transit system comparable to how Dickens once described an experience of his as a small child. As Dickens sat in a local shop, inadvertently reading the swinging "coffee room" sign backward and forward, he found the new, foreign words "moor eeffoc" as deeply affecting his sensibilities, and sending shivers down his spine. Through my own inattention, scenes and images often seem to collide, invert themselves, and interrupt one another as I travel. It is this sense of Moor Eeffoc that I hope my photography captures - this slight disorientation by which the world beneath the city seems to me at once absolutely commonplace, and wonderfully strange. Photographs by Sasha Patkin.

Published on June 27, 2012