Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.
 
Walker Evans «Subway Portraits»
Walker Evans, «Subway Portraits»
Photography | © Walker Evans
Open as full size image
Source: Walker Evans, Subway and Streets, hrsg. von Sarah Greenough, National Gallery of Art, Washington 1991, S. 28


 
Walker Evans «Subway Portraits»Walker Evans «Subway Portraits» | The Passengers

Categories: Photography

Keywords: Group | Politics | Space | Surveillance | Perception

Relevant passages:

icon: authorJens Schröter «Archive—post/photographic»

Check as well:

Henry Fox Talbot| Alphonse Bertillon| Thomas Ruff


photo series
 

 Walker Evans
«Subway Portraits»

In the 1930s Evans photographed passengers in the New Yorker Subway. Using a 35mm camera hidden under his coat he captured the person opposite unobserved. This selection of portraits of women, intended for an earlier unpublished version of «Many Are Called,» which Evans called «The Passengers (Hidden Camera in the New York Subway)», was compiled around 1961. Sarah Greenough said of The Passengers: «[It] emphasizes the mug-shot-like quality of some of the photographs.» (Sarah Greenough, «Many Are Called and Many Are Chosen. Walker Evans and the Anonymous Portrait,» in: Walker Evans, Subways and Streets, ed. Sarah Greenough, Washington 1991 (pp. 13–46), p. 27). The complex work of Walker Evans combines confronting the surveillance and depicting process used by the police with other aspects – such as generating the anonymous in the realm of modern urban life.