Drive Bys
2005 - Present
Drive Bys is an ongoing photographic project through which Mark Mangion constructs a vast and evolving archive of fleeting encounters gathered across multiple countries, territories, and landscapes. Made from moving vehicles travelling through cities, towns, industrial zones, deserts, coastlines, and rural environments, the series captures distant and often incidental fragments of people, architecture, infrastructure, and everyday life. Taken at speed and from a position of transience, the photographs occupy a space between documentary observation and accidental discovery.
The project adopts an almost archaeological methodology, yet one driven by chance rather than systematic survey. Each image isolates a moment that would otherwise remain unnoticed—a figure standing at the edge of a road, a solitary building, a gathering in the distance, a temporary structure, a fragment of landscape caught between disappearance and recognition. Removed from their original context, these moments become visual artefacts, traces of lives and places encountered only briefly before vanishing from view.
Central to the work is the relationship between movement and observation. The photographs are produced from a position of continual passage, where looking is conditioned by speed, distance, and uncertainty. Unlike traditional documentary photography, which often depends upon prolonged engagement and direct access, Drive Bys embraces incompleteness. The viewer is offered only fragments, partial narratives, and unresolved situations. What is visible becomes inseparable from what remains unknown.
The resulting images possess a distinctive tension between intimacy and detachment. They are at once observational and intrusive, recording moments that were never consciously offered to the camera. In this sense, the photographs function as a form of visual trespass—small acts of appropriation that transform ordinary occurrences into subjects of contemplation. Yet rather than exploiting these encounters, the work foregrounds their fragility, acknowledging the impossibility of fully understanding the people and places it records.
The project can also be understood as a reflection on contemporary mobility and perception. Increasingly, our experience of the world is mediated through transit—through cars, trains, aircraft, screens, and networks that compress distance and accelerate movement. Drive Bys embraces this condition, presenting a world encountered through glimpses rather than prolonged encounters. Landscapes become sequences of passing images; lives appear as momentary intersections within larger trajectories of movement.
Across the series, geography becomes both specific and anonymous. Individual locations retain their particular character while simultaneously contributing to a broader portrait of a globally connected world. Urban peripheries, roadside architectures, informal settlements, agricultural landscapes, and fleeting human presences accumulate into a dispersed archive of contemporary existence. The project resists hierarchy, treating the monumental and the mundane with equal attention.
Ultimately, Drive Bys is a meditation on time, distance, and the act of looking itself. The photographs preserve moments that were never intended to be remembered, transforming chance observations into enduring records. They exist as stolen fragments of reality—brief interruptions in the flow of movement that reveal the complexity, vulnerability, and quiet poetry of lives unfolding beyond the window. Through this ongoing process of collection and accumulation, Mangion constructs an alternative archaeology of the present, one composed not of grand historical events but of transient encounters, overlooked details, and the innumerable stories that pass us by each day.