TateShots Bruce Davidson’s Subway

“I wanted to transform the subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the colour, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day.”

Photographer Bruce Davidson talked to TateShots about Subway, the groundbreaking series of portraits he began taking in the New York subway system in the spring of 1980:

The series was collected into a book published by Aperture in 1986, and the 25th anniversary edition of Subway was published last year. The New York Review of Books ran excerpt of the introduction to that new edition here.