It was a Thursday morning. I was on the Q train, crossing the Manhattan Bridge, on my way to work. I was still figuring out what you could do with an iPhone — which was a lot less than you can do now, this was an iPhone 4. The cell phone before this one didn’t have a camera.
But I was standing over a man in a suit reading a book in Hebrew. And next to him, on the other side of the pole, sat a second man. He wore a leather jacket and was reading something in Arabic — on his iPhone.
I snuck a snapshot. I posted it on Instagram. Two people liked it. And one left a comment… “Peeping Tom?”
Subway photography soon became a daily habit. I posted my subway photographs on Instagram, on Twitter, even on Facebook — this was 2011. And I went from being someone who admires street photography, who interviews street photographers and writes stories about street photography, to kind of being a street photographer. Except I was doing it on the subway, so I’d become a subway photographer.
One person who followed my subway photographs invoked Many Are Called, the book of subway photography by Walker Evans. Walker Evans is revered as *the* great American photographer and also as the great American *subway* photographer, the first to show subway photographs at MoMA.
Now Walker Evans wasn’t the *only* subway photographer. So I started looking at old pictures by Helen Levitt, Stanley Kubrick, Enrico Natali, Bruce Davidson. I followed subway photography accounts on Instagram, both for hobbyists and professionals. A few of them made their reputations with subway photography.
Over the past dozen years, I’ve gone through three iPhones, and had a bunch of jobs, each with different commutes and at different times. I stayed off the subway for a year because of COVID. Yet I keep coming back to subway photography.
So I decided to start talking to other people who’ve taken photographs on the subway.
I want to know why they started…
… what they get out of it…
…and what their limits are…
So this podcast will be a series of conversations with subway photographers. And when I say “podcast,” I mean a loose and conversational kind of podcast, like an oral history or open notebook.
When Walker Evans was thinking of names for Many Are Called, one idea he considered was Metropolitan Faces. It’s a pretty good title, he’s not using it, and I bought the domain name years ago.
Metropolitan Faces is a group effort. Everyone’s got a different story. And maybe through trying to understand their various projects, it will help me to better understand mine.
Even if you’re not a subway photographer, you might find it interesting to listen. Subway photography is a way to think about how people move through the city, about fear and risk, about flânerie and surveillance, about public and private, about race and class and gender and identity, about being together and being alone.