Subway Portrait 1938 - 1941

Walker Evans captured this subway portrait with a camera – a device that’s kind of like a prosthetic eye, right? I can only imagine him, trying to be invisible on the subway, trying to catch that New York minute. What’s so compelling is how he renders these riders in such a dignified way. They're just trying to get from A to B, but he sees something more, a kind of quiet heroism. I wonder what it was like for him to be the artist in that moment, framing and capturing the everyday, immortalizing it. He's not just documenting; he's composing, like a painter arranging elements on a canvas. This work makes me think of other artists obsessed with the everyday, like Fairfield Porter, who found poetry in the mundane. In the end, artists just keep looking and responding to each other across time. And it’s like they’re asking us: what do you see?