I'm only gonna tell you one more time before I come over there and punch you out: stop pointing that camera at us!

You might think that these subway photos are entirely "accidental" and unplanned -- and to some extent you would be correct, as I never known, in advance, exactly what I'll find or what kind of photos I'll end up with. But it's not entirely random, as you'll come to understand when I describe some of the details associated with this collection of 10 "keepers" that I selected out of 102 photos taken on Mar 30, 2010.

 

First of all, the idea of taking some subway photos usually only occurs to me on rainy days. If it's bright and sunny outside, who would want to spend his time down underground, where it's dark and noisy and claustrophobic? Also, people who venture outside on rainy days normally have bright, colorful umbrellas (as well as the boring, black ones), and the women often wear equally bright, colorful Welly boots. Once they get down into a subway station, safely away from the rain, they go through various rituals of stamping their feet to shake off the water, folding their umbrellas to put them away, and generally unbuckling/unsnapping/unzipping their restrictive rain gear.

 

As it turns out, there had been heavy rain all morning on Tues, Mar 30th -- and since that made it impractical to sit outside and take my usual "peeps in the 'hood" photos, I thought it would be a good time to return to the subways once again. Unfortunately, the rain slacked off in the middle of the day, so the umbrella/boot outfits turned out to be much less interesting than I would have expected.

 

Aside from that, I had no idea -- and never do have any idea -- of what to expect. Having taken subway photos on roughly half a dozen occasions, I do know that I'm likely to see a different crowd of subway-riders in the middle of the week than on the weekend; and there will be different people in the middle of the day than during rush-hour, or during the period right after public schools release all their kids. But aside from that, it's an unpredictable potpourri of workers (some blue-collar, some white-collar), students, tourists, young children, parents and grandparents, homeless people, cops, and utterly mysterious strangers. On this particular occasion, I decided to sit on the uptown side of the 96th Street station, because I figured (rightly or wrong, who knows?) that there would probably be more people heading downtown towards Times Square than uptown toward Morningside Heights and Harlem.

 

Some people are photographically interesting simply because of the way they look, or the way they dress; others are interesting because of what they are doing -- e.g., running, walking briskly, tossing their hair around, or interacting with a friend or family member, or (as is so often the case in my subway-photography experiences) reading, listening to music, or just daydreaming about their own private world. Thus, one photo may be enough; but with the slow shutter speeds that I typically have to use in the dimly lit subway station, I'll normally take two or three just to be safe. And if the subject(s) is/are "doing" something, then I'll often take half a dozen photos, in the hope that one or two of them will turn out to be interesting. And that helps explain why I typically only keep about 10% of the photos I take; the rest are blurred, out-of-focus, redundant, or merely ordinary...

 

There's another consequence of this approach: inevitably, I know much more about the "context" of the subject(s) I photograph than does anyone who views the resulting photograph that I publish/upload to Flickr -- because I've spent at least a few seconds watching what they're doing, and I've taken several other photos in which they sometimes look (or act) quite differently. I don't think about it very much, but I realize that I subconsciously just assume that viewers have the same context in mind that I do ... but over and over again, it becomes evident that it just ain't so. An example: I once photographed a woman sitting at an outside cafe on Broadway, a few blocks from where these subway photos were taken; and a few months later, I was startled to see the photo published in a Turkish blog about how to select tour guides in Istanbul.

 

Ultimately, I have to admit that even I don't know what the "real" context is, i.e., what the subject of my photos are actually thinking or doing -- except in the very rare circumstances when I introduce myself to the subject and speak to him/her. But most of the time, I just try to imagine what's going on in their lives; and I use that imagination to come up with the title/caption that I put on most of the photos. In most cases, the title/captions represent a feeble, but deliberate, attempt at humor; but in any case, it's important that I admit that in most cases, I have no idea whether those caption/titles are accurate or realistic.

 

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This is a continuation of a series of subway photos that I began in the spring of 2009, and which you can find here. Thus far in 2010, my photographic efforts have included the IRT subway stations at 96th Street, 42nd Street (Times Square), and Christopher Street/Sheridan Square (in Greenwich Village).

 

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Over the years, I've seen various photos of the NYC subway "scene," usually in black-and-white format. But during a spring 2009 class on street photography at the NYC International Center of Photography (ICP), I saw lots and lots of terrific subway shots taken by my fellow classmates ... so I was inspired to start taking some myself.

 

One of the reasons I rarely, if ever, took subway photos before 2009 is that virtually every such photo I ever saw was in black-and-white. I know that some people are fanatics about B/W photography as a medium; and I respect their choice. And I took quite a lot of B/W photographs in the 1970s, especially when I had my own little makeshift darkroom for printing my own photos.

 

But for the past 30 years, I've focused mostly on color photography. As for photos of subways, I don't feel any need to make the scene look darker and grimier than it already is, by restricting it to B/W. Indeed, one of the things I find quite intriguing is that there is a lot of color in this environment, and it's not too hard to give some warmth and liveliness to the scene...

 

To avoid disruption, and to avoid drawing attention to myself, I'm not using flash shots; but because of the relatively low level of lighting, I'm generally using an ISO setting of 3200 or 6400, depending on which camera I'm using. As a result, some of the shots are a little grainy - but it's a compromise that I'm willing to make.

 

I may eventually use a small "pocket" digital camera, but the initial photos have been taken with my somewhat large, bulky Nikon D300 and D700 DSLRs. If I'm photographing people on the other side of the tracks in a subway station, there's no problem holding up the camera, composing the shot, and taking it in full view of everyone. But if I'm taking photos inside a subway car, I normally set the camera lens to a wide angle (18mm or 24mm) setting, point it in the general direction of the subject(s), and shoot without framing or composing.

 

If I can find some situations where people hold still for a few seconds, I think I might try some HDR scenes, just to see what it looks like. But so far, no such occasions have presented themselves. We'll see how it goes...

Done