From Publishers Weekly
It's not the trains that are featured here, but the people on them. The Czech-born Peter's portraits follow in the tradition of Walker Evans's b&w shots of New York's underground public transit riders in Many Are Called (to be republished this month by Yale), taken in the 1940s with a camera he kept mostly concealed in his coat. Peter put his camera in a bag that he kept by his side, also capturing whoever was sitting across the aisle without their knowledge. (The technique restricted him to shooting when the trains weren't crowded and he was neither blocked by standers nor forced to give up his bag's seat.) Despite being candids, his full-color shots of one or two figures in mostly empty cars are somehow taken with the tacit "I don't care what you do" knowledge of his mostly working-class subjects from New York's panopoly of cultures—most of whom are exhaustedly internally focused, sleeping, reading, kissing or familialy slumping over one another. Former poet laureate Billy Collins in his foreword calls their shared expression "subway face"—"that look of self-absorption, the middle-distance stare that suggests that life has temporarily been suspended," one that, any New Yorker will report, alters only at the greatest shock.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
Between 2001 and 2002, Peter rode the subway almost every day, snapping photographs with a little camera hidden in a bag. The product is this collection of seventy-seven color pictures. Most of Peter's subjects are not well-off; some are homeless. All of them, Peter says, "seemed incredibly beautiful to me." Nor is this the Walker Evans-type of craggy beauty familiar in depictions of the poor; the bag lady's bags are a nice green, and clean. One picture, called "Three Kings," shows a weary mother with three little boys wearing paper crowns from Burger King. They have had a good day; one of the boys carefully adjusts his crown. Many of the photographs were shot in the wake of 9/11, and they radiate the tenderness toward the city that marked that time.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
