Tenderness in a Turbulent Time: Helen Levitt’s Subway Photography of 1978
by Sarah Grimes
New York City and the subway were in a tailspin in the 1970s.1 A fiscal crisis had nearly bankrupted the city, and the municipally-owned subway was one of the many divisions suffering the consequences. The trains ran late when they ran at all; subway cars and stations were covered in grime and graffiti; ridership was declining; and subway crime was on the rise, reaching 250 felonies a week by 1979.2 In the midst of this tumult, photographer Helen Levitt turned to the subways as her subject to take candid photographs of passengers.
As a lifelong resident of New York City, Levitt had begun taking street photographs in her twenties, capturing the everyday life of some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods in a lyrical style described by her frequent photographic colleague Walker Evans as “anti-journalistic.” Due to her inclination to capture people in her photographs as people, rather than subjects, she allowed their humanity to shine through in images that focused on more than just what filled the headlines.3 Although the 1970s are often written off as a dark age of the city’s history, Levitt continued to take candid photographs of the New York subway to portray moments of tenderness and affection at a time when public perception of the transit system was at an all-time low. Her photographs highlight the beauty of the everyday, focusing on capturing intimate moments between passengers without imposing her own vision onto the scene.4 Even in what many consider to be the darkest era of the subway, one that resulted in the formation of vigilante safety groups patrolling trains and platforms, Levitt was able to find the love that continued to thrive in spite of all the fear.5
Although she is better known for her photography on the streets of New York rather than below it, enjoying numerous solo and group exhibitions of her street scenes as well as several retrospectives following her death in 2009, the decades following the 1970s have revealed an increased appreciation for Levitt’s subway scenes. She began her clandestine transit photography in the late 1930s with a Contax camera peering out between the buttons of her overcoat, capturing snapshots of New Yorkers going about their daily lives. As a photographer, she strove to be an informal observer, present in the world with a camera in hand rather than standing apart from her subjects by hiding behind a lens. Originally working with Evans, Levitt set out to photograph the moments of brief proximity with strangers on the subway brought about by metropolitan life. After her collaboration with Evans ended in the 1930s, Levitt focused on both street photography and filmmaking before returning to the subways in 1978.6 Eschewing the journalistic tendency of the time to highlight suffering in communities, Levitt chose instead to poetically emphasize the beauty in quiet moments, capturing tenderness by presenting images of couples, families, friends, or strangers, rather than the crime or degradation on the subway during the time. Her subjects varied in age, gender, and race, but each photograph highlighted the tender sides of the city’s residents, portraying both the love Levitt had for New York, and the love New Yorkers had for each other.
In one of Levitt’s untitled photographs, taken in 1978, a young couple sits on one of the long plastic benches of the subway (fig. 2). Both appear to be asleep, the woman’s head nestled on the man’s shoulder while he rests his head against hers. Her white feather jacket and his striking fedora suggest a quiet moment of rest after returning from a lively time out on the town, or a breath taken before venturing out. Although the wall behind the couple is covered in graffiti and peeling paint, it fades into the background, bringing the sleeping pair into sharper focus. The couple parallels a similar pair of straphangers depicted forty years earlier in Isac Friedlander’s etching 3:AM (1933), which depicts ten early-morning riders on the subway. The state of the transit system may have declined, but the tenderness of the passengers had not faded.
In another 1978 photograph, Levitt captured another couple sitting on one of the two-seater, “Mahattan-style” benches beside the doors of the subway (fig. 3). The man has his arm around the woman’s shoulders and his hand resting atop hers, as she gives him a fond smile, leaning against his side. Seated in their small corner of the train, they are concerned only with each other. Here, the writing on the wall is clearer than in other photos. “Voice of the ghetto” is scrawled in marker above the couple, which was the tag of a prominent graffiti artist of the time known as STAY HIGH 149.7 The image has captioned itself–the graffiti artist, the self-proclaimed “voice of the ghetto,” exists alongside the couple on the subway, the voice of the everyman. The tenderness of the couple is what the voice of the people hopes to say despite the harshness of the urban jungle around them. Levitt’s photograph both encapsulates the quiet affection of the couple and provides a snapshot of the vast underground artistic tradition of the graffiti artists of the era.
Graffiti was divisive among the subway riders at the time and was detested by the transit authority. Originally little more than written names or tags, often called scribble, graffiti later evolved into pieces of art that could span multiple subway cars.8 Although the transit authority and municipal government consistently fought to quell the rise of graffiti, the artists believed they were beautifying the subways, and were able to form new communities as they did so.9 Graffiti artist groups provided a positive outlet for many youth at the time, with the subway acting as a focal point that allowed for the formation of writer groups and informal meet-ups, letting youth speak in their own creative voice in a way that they would not have been able to do otherwise. Levitt provides glimpses of this dynamic through her framing, and, by extension, the larger community that produced them, as harmonious with, rather than in opposition to, the affection found among the subway riders.
Levitt did not limit her photography to romantic displays of love. In one of her more crowded photos, Levitt captures three adults sitting packed together on a long bench, each with a child on their lap, evoking what appears to be an intergenerational family group (fig. 4). An older woman at the left holds the oldest child on her lap who clutches a ball. Beside them sits a man who holds a younger sleeping child on his lap, while another woman sits beside him, cradling the youngest child, a sleeping infant, in her arms. Here Levitt has cropped the photograph close, cutting off the tops of the adults’ heads to focus on the three children and their staggered levels of wakefulness. Again it is a quiet, intimate moment, though Levitt appears as an observer rather than an intruder, emphasizing the quiet moments of love present in the subway, and the hope placed on the future generation.10
The subway has been a marvel since the day it opened on October 27th, 1904.11 It is the great democratizer, bringing together people of every race, color, class, and creed, standing them shoulder to shoulder as they rocket through the dark underground. The subway is integral to the fabric of the city, responsible for the development of the five boroughs and the numerous communities that were only able to spring up because of the easy transit between home and work it provided.12 665 miles of track act as the steadily beating heart of the city, welcoming all New Yorkers into its grasp, providing a moment of rest even as they are jostled among the throngs of other straphangers. It is a creator of connections, a muse for artists, a transporter of people’s bodies and spirits alike. From graffiti to photography, from the ornate designs of subway stations to the musicians who play in them, in spite of all the struggles dotting its history, the New York City subway and the people it connects have been a catalyst of artistic invention since it first opened.13 Art such as Helen Levitt’s subway photography provides a look at the beauty present in such mundanity, highlighting the commonality present between all passengers on the subway.
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Sarah Grimes is a first year MA student in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Her research explores the overlaps between mainstream culture and the counterculture art world, and the intersection between art and the everyday.
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1. Clifton Hood, 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 259.
2. Dennis J. Kenney, Crime, Fear, and the New York City Subways: The Role of Citizen Action (Praeger Publishers, 1987), 15.
3. David Campany, Helen Levitt: Manhattan Transit, eds. M. Hoshino & T. Zander (Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017), 9.
4. Campany, Helen Levitt, 7.
5. Kenney, Crime, Fear, and the New York City Subways, 9.
6. Campany, Helen Levitt, 5-8.
7. Ivor Miller, Aerosol Kingdom: Subway Painters of New York City (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 60.
8. Jack Stewart, Graffiti Kings: New York City Mass Transit Art of the 1970s (Melcher Media, 2009), 1.
9. Stewart, Graffiti Kings, 175.
10. Campany, Helen Levitt, 9.
11. Hood, 722 Miles, 93.
12. Hood, 722 Miles, 132.
13. Susie J. Tanenbaum, Underground Harmonies: Music and Politics in the Subways of New York (Cornell University Press, 1995), ix.