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In 1938 Walker Evans went underground to photograph passengers on the New York City Subway. Interested in capturing the everyday routines of anonymous people, Evans wanted to catch his subjects unaware. “The guard is down and the mask is off,” he wrote, “even more than when in lone bedrooms (where there are mirrors). People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.”Between 1938 and 1941, using a hidden camera, Evans photographed his subjects in these unguarded moments. In order to create his clandestine photographs, he orchestrated a way of taking photographs “undercover.” He painted the shiny chrome of his camera black and hid it under his coat so that the camera lens surreptitiously peeked out between two buttons. Despite the public setting of the subway, Evans managed to capture people lost in their own thoughts and moods, displaying a range of human emotions. With these black-and-white photographs, Evans managed to pull off a complicated feat: creating truly unposed portraits. - MOMA l Learn
Pick one image from the Subway Portrait series and
write a short story in which you imagine the inner life of the person photographed.
2 Comments
Han
11/16/2015 09:23:58 pm
The person might be traveling from England. The women is a maid working in urban which is far from her hometown. Her life is boring compare to the life she has in her hometown. In the urban, she lives alone and work everyday. At the moment the photo was taken, she reminds herself of the memory she got in her childhood, living with her family. And she is imagining how happy her family is when they meet up with each other.
Quang Huy
11/16/2015 09:26:17 pm
Among the 3 photographs, i chose the first one, which is about a pretty old man travelling on a subway. In my opinion, the man is an retiree. According to my imagination, the man's wife or his best friend just passed away and he's travelling back home from the cemetery. As i could obviously see much of grief and depression on the old man's face, I guess that he is suffering from the death of his beloved person and loneliness of his life home. Also, I think that the man is thinking about the emptiness when coming back home Leave a Reply. |
