Week 3: Current Event

Six killed as New York train hits vehicle

The above link is for an article from the BBC. The article reviews the train accident on the Metro North Harlem Line that occurred on Tuesday, February 3rd.

BBC World News is my news engine of choice, and I check it every day to keep up with events. Until I read this article, I had not though much about the collision; I had just heard that there was a train accident on the Metro North. Then I realized how serious it was. The Harlem line (where the accident happened) is the same route that I take whenever I go to the city from SUNY Purchase. The front train car collided with an SUV that had for some reason stalled on the tracks, which I believe was a freak occurrance (the NTSB is still investigating the events). But what bothers me the most is that the door to the front train car would not open. It was jammed, rendering the passengers trapped as the interior of the train car burned out. "If there was an engineer problem or a train problem, or an equipment problem, we'll learn from it. But sometimes, there are just accidents," said Gov. Cuomo at the scene.

This may be true, but I can't help blaming Metro North for the unsafe door that was stuck. Many small factors add up to make a disaster like this one, and many are not anyone's fault in particular, but I have a feeling that this small factor should have been avoided by Metro North's safety features.

This, and the fresh memory of the December 2013 accident that left four people dead after a train car derailed, were fuel to my outrage upon reading this story. This news hit close to home and made me consider that I might not be safe while taking my usual train ride to the city. I quickly looked up several more articles by more local journals. I was planning on riding a train to the city that weekend, and with the accident in mind I was not so sure. After I was satisfied that I knew every detail there was to know, I decided that if there was a current event that I was most passionate about, it would be this one. It always helps to make art about something you're angry over.

With this outrage in mind, I figured that the most effective way to communicate my position (and the most satisfactory) would be to show it in a physical and unmistakable way. No subtlety. I went to the Metro North station in White Plains where all of us SUNY Purchase students go to get to New York City and took photos of the station. I tried to photograph the casual things, like the benches, signs, train schedules, and of course, the tracks. I even got some train cars in there, too. Then, after I developed my film, I melted those Metro North photographs with a lighter until it sizzled and bubbled. I also scratched the film with a small needle, mainly on the parts of the photograph associated with the accident: the train car, the tracks, the rails. I wanted my anger to come across, so I took a direct route by calling back to the fatal fire of Tuesday's accident and by permanently damaging the film.

I've never done something like this to my film before, so it was innovative for me (although I know that the tactic has been used many times before). There's just something about the raw aggression involved in destroying one's film with fire, that demonstrates my emotions toward this topic. I hope that the emotion comes through to the viewer when the photographs are done.