“Levitt and Evans shared a profound interest in the appearance of modern citizens – how metropolitan life throws us into close and brief proximity with strangers. . . [the subway] was a space of chance encounters, where the random flow of people is temporarily sorted by the ordered rows of seats.”
—David CampanyIn the 1930s, as the young Helen Levitt was developing her photographic practice, she reached out to Walker Evans, whose work she admired. The two became friends and began photographing together, and when Evans started photographing in the New York City subways, Levitt frequently accompanied him. After a few such outings, Levitt began making her own images of passengers, such as the photograph offered here. While her subway photographs are less well-known than Evans’s, they are just as much a collective portrait of New York and inhabit an important place within Helen Levitt’s empathetic and perceptive documentation of the city and its people. In the 1970s, Levitt returned to the subways with her camera, making a significant body of work later published in the book, Manhattan Transit: The Subway Photographs of Helen Levitt (2017).
