Magnifying The Moment: Joni Sternbach’s Pictures of NYC Subway Passengers 1976–1981

“Part of the reason I was drawn to the Subway was that it was a perfect unchoreographed stage. Chance brought me together with a crowd of unknowns. It was up to me to parse them out and magnify the moment.”

– Joni Sternbach on her pictures of NYC Subway Passengers in the 1970s

 

 

Native New Yorker Joni Sternbach photographed people riding the city’s Subway from 1975 to 1980. Now a renowned photographer known for her teaching and pictures of surfers and surf culture rendered in the wet-plate collodion tintype process, Sternbach began an early project recording figures in New York in the 1970s. Much like Willy Spiller and Bruce Davidson and Christopher Morris did in the 1980s, Stanley Kubrick did in the 1940s, and Walker Evens did in the 1930s, Sternbach saw moments of tenderness and alienation.

 

 

“I photographed ‘The Passengers’ in the 1970s on New York City subway. I took out a student loan and bought my first Leica (M3) which I was very eager to use. In those days, the search for subject matter was a little ephemeral, like a clue scattered into the streets like fairy dust. It seemed I did more commuting than wandering around the streets, so using my camera while on the subway made sense. I looked to the old masters, to see if any of them had done this before. How could they not have! I found Walker Evans’s photographs and while I loved them, they were not the kind of pictures I wanted to make. I admired Evans’s stealth approach and it was obvious that I too needed to be discreet, although my camera would not be invisible. I suppose I had my reasons for concentrating on families and friends, caught in moments of tenderness or alienation.”

– Joni Sternbach, via BlackBox Projects

 

 

You can buy a zone of these image of New York Subway Passengers in the 1970s at Cafe Royal Books.