A matrix of safety yellow weaves together the first image in Portland photographer Rian Dundon’s latest book, Passenger. Signage, an LED banner; hand grips, railings, and their reflections in the windows right and left. Out the windshield is an upturned yellow recycling bin and the dead grass it sits on. And there’s the yellow cord you pull to let the driver know you’re ready to get off the bus. “The photographer is a 43-year-old, divorced American dad,” Dundon writes in the introduction, like stage directions. “His family and city are splintering…. We are scattered between points of departure and arrival.” Wherever you’re headed, surely this yellow cage will deliver you in one piece.

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. Protest City, from 2023, is about Portland’s Black Lives Matter protests. But Dundon sees each book’s framing as retroactive: “It’s a bit of a misnomer to be like, ‘This is a project that I went out and shot.’” Instead, they’re “culled from a way of living with photography,” he says, “making pictures rolling through the world.”

Editing is also where the projects find their critical angle. People always want to know—as if it can be so reduced—what “side” Dundon is on after reading Protest City, which features both assault rifle–toting members of the far-right group Patriot Prayer and presumably leftist protesters wearing play-action armor. Many are strapped with live-streaming cameras, identified in the book as weaponized tools of documentation. The New Yorker called the book a “powerful defense of photography as a craft” and a “welcome counterpoint to the so-called protest photographer”: a person whose conspicuous signaling as a member of the press, formal or otherwise, is used both for their own protection and to advertise their virtue. Dundon escapes the same label—because? For starters, his only equipment is a compact point-and-shoot, and he points it in all directions.

There are remnants of the protests in Passenger, as there are in Portland. Dundon, who is 43 and, outside of a slew of day jobs, adjuncts at Clark College and Portland State University, sees it in part as a follow-up to Protest City. This time around, however, pointing the camera at his immediate surroundings became a way of pointing it at himself. It’s nighttime before we see the bus interior again, 11:09pm by its clock: we’re going home. Its track lights have shone an electric rhubarb color across the scene. The windowsills and grips glow with Dundon’s daughter Mazie’s favorite color, the color (or a rhyming hue) she wears most of the eight times she appears in the book. Like many in Passenger, the photograph is as much about what’s behind the camera as is in front of it.

The city Dundon commutes through, and what the book incidentally adopts as a subject, is the nebulous consequence of the past five years. What is Portland like now? What slow changes brew in the wake of these monumental shifts? Was it alarming to read the number “five” in the sentence above? Texturally, his photos are unpolished and almost exclusively shot with a hard flash—an aesthetic that suits this clash of interior warmth (humanity, which has a way of shining through) and the imposing cold of systemic failures. The most violent photo is of a burning porta-potty, presumably supplied by the city for its unhoused population. A close look reveals a tag: “Keep clean & don’t burn down PLEASE! —your local users.”

The photo is crude at face value. Literal and metaphorical pyrotechnics abound. Yet it eludes the quality Dundon is so critical of: the “protest” photographer’s self-interested recording and broadcasting others’ suffering. How? It’s his life he’s recording. The images are notable because Dundon hasn’t sought them out. Making a record of the tableaus he, and anyone living in the city, sees each day is a way of questioning the existing condition.

Short of one direct self-portrait, we see Dundon mostly in reflective surfaces lit up by his flash. In one, bounced off a glossy window ad, he wears a duck canvas jacket and dark beanie. On the opposite page is a portrait of two unhoused men, one of whom wears a similar outfit. “I realized that later,” Dundon says. “You know, Carhartt weather.” Yet the symmetry is powerful.

It’s hard to pin down what gives a photograph visual empathy: you know a photographer’s genuine investment when you see it. For Dundon, gaining subjects’ consent is crucial. In contrast to documentary photography’s classic ideals of “catching” a fleeting, and therefore true-to-life, moment, it’s apparent his subjects know they’re being photographed (the man in the matching outfit wears an awkward half-smile). What he’s capturing isn’t moving quite so fast, anyway. It’s on a treadmill, on the bus, Groundhog Day.

“That’s the rhythm, right?” Dundon says. “The grind, the wheels on the bus. We’re back, we’re crossing over the same bridge. It’s two seasons later, but it’s the same view as it is every day.” Is it?