John Schabel photographed airline passengers from outside the aircraft, and in his series the windows of the planes frame the people inside. The cabin lights are on, the windows are small, and the passengers sit waiting, sleeping, or staring ahead, unaware of the camera. The repeated window frames give these otherwise separate moments a common visual structure.

Passengers gathers seventy-three duotone plates, each framed almost identically: a section of fuselage, a window, a face. The repetition is the point. As critic Laura M. Andre observes, the planes move down the runway like products on an assembly line, and the passengers emerge from Schabel’s camera with the same mechanical regularity, identically framed, one after another. That very mechanisation lays bare an emotional and intellectual relationship between people and flight that is usually overlooked.

Twin Palms Publishers published the book in November 2011 in hardcover: eighty-four pages, eight by ten inches, with seventy-three duotone plates. The compact vertical format keeps attention on the limited space through which each passenger becomes visible.

For viewers, Passengers works through restraint. There is no spectacle, no dramatic narrative. There is a system, and there are people inside it, and the photographs hold both in view at once. The sequencing of the plates turns that single idea into a sustained visual argument, and the duotone printing gives the images a density that suits their oddly private public setting. Its sequence invites the reader to compare gestures, postures and degrees of visibility within a consistently restricted frame.