Dundon made the photo from his regular seat on either the 71 or the 12, one of two buses he'd take to his supermarket security job through most of 2023. It's a new day. The sun's fresh energy persists through the bus's sturdy grid of handles and poles, a private joy held in Dundon's lens before the monotony of yet another day sets in. The first of four images in the book of this same scene, it's a picture that asks: 'Do you ever have déjà vu, Mrs. Lancaster?' And the world can only answer back: 'I don't think so, but I could check with the kitchen.'
The camera is Dundon's defense against Groundhog Day. 'The pictures are a kind of therapy,' he told me, a 'balm for uncertainty,' something to place him in the world. Passenger is somewhat diffuse contrasted with Dundon's previous three books. His first, Changsha, is a personal and artful travelog of his moving to China in the early aughts; Fan a portrait of working as the Chinese singer and movie star Fan Bingbing's 'fake' English teacher, a semiconscious prop of her manufactured celebrity.
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