There are all sorts of legitimate excuses to avoid riding in the rain. The roads are slick. Your glasses get foggy. Motorists splatter you with filth.
None of that stops the brave---some might say foolhardy---commuters in Wiktoria Wojciechowska’s Short Flashes. They press on through the cold and wind, braving the streets of Hangzhou and Beijing protected by raincoats that swallow them and appear comically inadequate to the task. Frankly, they all look miserable. "This uncomfortable situation makes them focused on the goal," Wojciechowska says. "They don’t care how they look."
The Polish photographer noticed the cyclists almost immediately upon arriving in Hangzhou in September, 2013, which happens to be the end of the rainy season. They zipped past her in all directions, their colorful coats brightening the gray surrounding her. She wondered who they were and where they were going. One cyclist in particular made her pause. "Her face was pale and tightly framed by [her] pink hood," she says. "She was lost in her thoughts and probably waiting for something, raindrops flowing down her face onto her pink raincoat body to her freezing reddish hands."
Over the next six months, Wojciechowska began photographing commuters in Hangzhou and later Beijing. Capturing her subjects was as simple as placing her Canon 5D Mark II on a tripod on the sidewalk, tying an umbrella to it and waiting. She combined a speedlight with long exposures to simultaneously freeze their movement while conveying it.
The photos capture that moment when a stranger briefly piques your interest before moving on just as quickly, never to be seen again. The cyclist's faces are crisp and distinct, contrasting with the gestural blur of their turquoise, purple and yellow coats. The effect is at once quirky and almost painterly, combining clarity and confusion. For Wojciechowska, the images were an antidote to loneliness. When she started the project, she didn’t know anyone in Hangzhou and didn’t speak Mandarin. Photography offered a way out of isolation to engage with a culture she didn't understand, to feel a sense of solidarity with people she would never meet and have some way of remembering them. "It was like creating a picture album of strangers," she says.
Short Flashes will be released as a photo book by Bemojake in May 2016.
