Please specify the group

Photography: Walker Evans’ NYC Subway Portraits

Riding the subway is an experience of alternately judging people and ignoring them by playing phone games. Looking at Walker Evans’ subway portraits, not much has changed. It is somehow reassuring to know that even in the 1930s, New Yorkers were still annoyed by the general presence of pretty much everyone else. What is different, however, is the general proliferation of fur. And hats. Lots of hats.

After documenting depression-era rural America in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans turned his attention to city life and New York was the obvious choice.   Over a period of three years, between 1938- 1941, Evans took photographs of fellow subway riders with a camera hidden in his coat. Despite the surreptitious hiding place, many of the subjects seem to stare directly into the lens as if they are totally aware that they are becoming subject matter (which says something about the intensity of a subway stare).

For a more refined interpretation of Walker Evans photographs, I turn to James Agee, who wrote the introduction to Evans’ book on the images, Many Are Called. He writes,

Those who use the New York subways are several millions…They are members of every race and nation of the earth. They are of all ages, of all temperaments, of all classes, of almost every imaginable occupation. Each is incorporate in such an intense and various concentration of human beings as the world has never known before. Each, also, is an individual existence, as matchless as a thumbprint or a snowflake. Each wears garments which of themselves are exquisitely subtle uniforms and badges of their being. Each carries in the postures of his body, in his hands, in his face, in the eyes, the signatures of a time and a place in the world upon a creature for whom the name immortal soul is one mild and vulgar metaphor.

I’ve seen many people on the subway to whom I might apply the term “vulgar metaphor”, and I laude Agee for finally giving me a vocabulary to do so. But like it or not, we somehow put up with each other- even if it is only in the name of going from Point A to Point B. For more photos and commentary, visit Neon Mamacita.

Also check out these rarely seen photographs of the NYC subway in the 1960s by Magnum photographer Danny Lyon.

 fashion, manhattan, subway, vintage

 

By annie shepard
 
Origanally From https://untappedcities.com

This entry was posted on in homepage. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: