Subway stations are universally known as places full of motion where you can easily feel claustrophobic – that’s how I feel about it, anyway. This is not the case in Nick Frank’s photos, however. The Munich photographer succeeds in recognizing as well as capturing beauty within functional architecture. Bright and deserted, his photography is reminiscent of Star Trek’s engine room at night rather than any motif on earth. With a little bit of imagination, you’d almost think the elevator at Brudermühlstraße Station in Munich is the Starship’s warp core.
I have always taken the view that it is considerably easier to take a good photo if the motif is unprecedented. Stick to the point of starships, for instance, you are camping in the middle of nowhere with your camera ready and just when you are making a campfire, a UFO touches down right before your nose. You would have to suffer a stroke for excitement to miss such an extraordinary opportunity. But what to do with motifs which we see on a daily basis, the ones that are neither new nor exciting? Frankly, I have no clue. And that’s exactly why I hold photographers like Nick Frank in high regard; photographers with the ability to detect something in daily motifs and stage them marvelously.
