Adam Magyar, *Urban Flow #1364, London*, 2008, 10 x 94 1/2” pigment print.

ANDREA BLANCH: Our issue is about ritual; and I think your series Urban Flow pertains to ritual. Are you still working on it?

ADAM MAGYAR: No. I completed that in 2008. I plan to add a few more images this year around November in New York, but otherwise the series is done.

AB: How did it come to be?

AM: Well, I was in a collection of street photography before, and it didn’t please me. Something was missing because I wanted to talk about existence and our transiency, but those photos were misguided in a way. People didn’t think about being. They thought about characters and life situations. But I liked street photography, and I think I am still a street photographer. I’m just experimenting with doing it in a different way. I had a few years when I was struggling with myself about how to step out of the conventional way of capturing this kind of nothingness, because the street is pretty empty. If you are not focusing on characters or events on the street, then it’s just about getting from one point to another. It’s wasting time; nothing really happens. It’s eventless. All my situations capturing are eventless.

I wanted to depict being. So the images have to be a particular distance from nothingness. I tried to do something that is very real and deep, and a bit depressing as well.

“Urban Flow” is not a good pressing. I think the later works became a bit darker. They are getting darker and darker. I guess my newest video “Array” is darker than the “Stainless” videos.

Adam Magyar, *Urban Flow #255, Hong Kong*, 2007, 10 x 94 1/2” pigment print.

AB: Do you feel your images speak specifically to urban life in the modern world or do they have a universal timeless quality?

AM: I hope to have the second. I don’t really talk about city life. I’m just working in cities because they are inspiring me. I like to get lost and to feel small. That inspires me. So urban spaces are the ultimate human spaces because we created them. Everything that you see here, that’s us. I’m interested in the human existence. That’s why I work in cities. Otherwise I don’t really see too much of that in my images. Or it’s not very important to me. You rarely see any interaction on my photos. Everyone is pretty much alone. I don’t always capture crowds. I work specifically in those situations where people are alone, like in the videos. I normally made them in the morning on weekdays when people go to work. Normally people go to work alone. That’s something that I am kind of interested in capturing. We are all living together, working in this world together and making it together. We are part of the system of little gears, but we don’t have to have too much to do with each other.

We have very few connections compared to how complicated this society and the whole global world now is.