Meet Your Neighbors: A “lens-based artist” with photos on display at The Den

Free Hand (Scott Lassman photo)

Think back to the first time you descended into an underground Metro station. The cavernous cathedral of concrete was a wonder to behold, and did it also feel different from the surface world somehow? Dreamlike and surreal?

“Something changes when you go underground,” writes Scott Lassman, a documentary, travel and street photographer, in a statement about “Subterranean,” his photo series now on display at The Den coffeehouse in Politics and Prose. “[L]ife underground often takes on the otherworldly feeling of dreams, where the familiar and the fantastical routinely intermix.”

Woman in White (Scott Lassman photo)

Lassman, who describes himself as a “lens-based artist,” lives in Forest Hills.

Scott Lassman

He says the series, at The Den through the end of September, attempts to capture some of the “strangeness and wonder” of the world of DC and New York subways. We think he succeeded, and we recommend that you check it out when you have a chance.

The Den is open daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Subterranean

This photography series documents life underground in the subway tunnels of Washington, D.C. and New York City. In his foreword to Walker Evans’ seminal book of photographs of the New York City subways, Many Are Called, Luc Sante described the subway as “a neutral zone in which people are free to consider themselves invisible; time spent commuting is a hiatus from social interaction.” Mr. Sante couldn’t be more right. Something changes when you go underground. People withdraw into their own inner
thoughts and operate in a dreamlike state. Whether they are by themselves on a subway platform or crushed together in a crowd, they often move through this subterranean world as if they are all alone, as if they don’t recognize the existence of other commuters or workers standing or working right next to them. As a result, life underground often takes on the otherworldly feeling of dreams, where the familiar and the fantastical routinely intermix. This series attempts to capture some of the strangeness and wonder of this solitary, subterranean world in the subways.

Prescott Moore Lassman (Instagram: @Lassman_Lenswork) is a lens-based artist living in Washington, D.C. whose work spans the genres of documentary, portrait, travel, and street photography. Using an intuitive approach, he searches for images that resonate, for moments of synchronicity in everyday life. His work focuses on those odd juxtapositions of elements that are connected not so much by logic or reason but rather by a deeper intrinsic meaning. Because this approach relies on unconscious triggers, his photographs are often richly symbolic, though their meaning is not immediately clear. For Lassman, this is the essence of photography: capturing an image that resonates and then, over the course of months or years, figuring out why. Lassman’s photographs have been exhibited and published widely, including as part of the D.C. City Hall Art Collection and D.C. Art Bank. This photography exhibition is supported by a grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.