Subway Portrait 1938 - 1941

This is Walker Evans’s photograph, Subway Portrait, printed on a small sheet of paper. He probably carried the camera under his coat so that his subjects wouldn't be aware he was capturing them. I love the light in this picture. The sepia tone, the way it hits the brim of the hat. And those women! Maybe one's a daughter and the other a mother, caught in their own worlds, oblivious. I can imagine Evans, on that subway in the 30s or 40s, thinking about the sheer variety of human expression, the interiority we all carry around with us, that he was trying to capture. The beauty of photography, like painting, is its indexical relationship to the world. It bears witness, it has that power of quiet observation. And a work like this speaks to other photographs, other portraits, other human attempts to document the self and others. It's such a simple premise, and it lets us see the poetry and emotion that is all around us.