In a Paris Review blog post, Blake Eskin wrote in 2012 about the nearly hundred-year-old tradition of secret subway photography.
Bruce Davidson photographed openly, but Arthur Leipzig hid his camera in a pet carrier. Helen Levitt used a right-angle viewfinder. Stanley Kubrick, on assignment for Look, tried it. And Walker Evans hid his Contax under his coat and shot blind, through a buttonhole, beginning in 1938…
Evans was guilty about doing it. But more than guilty, he was lured by what he called the “naked repose” in the faces of unsuspecting transit riders.
He waited until 1966, more than a decade, to publish the book, Many Are Called, which also appeared as an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
When you’re on the new light rail line this weekend, or riding through Seattle at any time in the light-rail-bright future, will you feel the temptation? What will this new wave of Seattle subway riders look like?
