Jonathan Tan’s cinemagraphs capture the quiet beauty in Singaporean lift lobbies

For residents in Singapore, the lift lobby is a familiar yet often overlooked space, says Jonathan Tan, a Singaporean artist who uses a cool blend of photography and video editing to create introspective, partially-frozen scenes of elevators – often our final stop before reaching home. Jonathan’s project Waiting For The Lift uses cinemagraphs (looping visuals that seamlessly blend still imagery with motion) to interweave nostalgia for the familiar, perhaps your first home, an old work place, or that pesky lift that always broke when your partner lived on the top floor. By isolating movement within an otherwise unchanging scene, the lift becomes kinetic, full of life, even magical. Inviting beauty into the mundane, Jonathan’s cinemagraphs reinvent reality.

“I wanted to capture the everyday lift lobby found in Singapore public housing in a different way,” says Jonathan. The suspension of movement in these edits creates a type of tunnel vision that one may experience in a moment of dissociation or even hyperfixation. Like those scenes in movies where the world slows down, or even the popular music video for Radiohead’s track Lift. Jonathan’s cinemagraphs reclaim the lobbies of housing blocks as places of almost sacred contemplation. When asked if we might need more quiet beauty in our lives right now, Jonathan says it best: “I think appreciating quiet beauty allows one to slow down in our otherwise fast-paced life, and just take a step back to appreciate what’s presently around us.” Perhaps cinemagraphs are the perfect medium for that.