Lucien Rizos has been a photographer since the 1970s and has also been a violinist with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra since 1974.

Rizos’ works, such as those taken between 1979 and 1982 and recently published in his rated book of documentary-style photographs A Man Walks out of a Bar (Rim Book, 2011), have been noted by writers and critics for their ability to present anonymous and distanced subjects that are also embedded within the culture of the photographs’ time. As both artist and traveler, Rizos took his photographs while on tour with the Orchestra, alternating performance dates with a consuming personal documentary project focused on what he saw performed every day on the road: the life of small communities in New Zealand.

In these three works, all from the artist’s Traffic Lights series of 1981, Rizos makes stills of different people, caught in the moment of crossing. With their tension between stillness and movement, and anonymity and identification, they catch us looking in, like the photographer, while his subjects stand and face us.