In winter of 1938 Walker Evans began a series of photographs made in the New York City subways. Working with a small 35-millimeter Contax camera which could be easily concealed, and frequently in the company of fellow photographer Helen Levitt, Evans sought to push past the conventions of traditional portrait photography to capture what he called ‘true portraiture.’ This involved days spent on the trains, watching for passengers who interested him in some way, and surreptitiously capturing their images. For Evans, it was crucial that his subjects were unaware they were being photographed in order to capture them unguarded, without artifice or performance. The resulting images are remarkable for their intimacy and immediacy.
While Evans’s work on the subways was extensive, it was little-known until 1966 when a selection of 80 were published in the monograph Many are Called. In that same year, an exhibition of 41 images from the series were exhibited in Walker Evans’ Subway, 1938-1941, at The Museum of Modern Art.
