NYPL showcases ‘electrifying’ rare subway photos from 1970s

An image in a new exhibit on the top floor of the New York Public Library’s main branch shows two women sitting in a subway car nearly 50 years ago. They appear exhausted, or deep in thought – as the train tracks loom impossibly close.

The dream-like image was created using a unique darkroom technique. It’s just one of the exhibit’s 42 images, all of which are slightly wider than a photograph shot on 35mm film. They line a long, narrow hallway in the library, which compliments the subject matter.

The photos were all shot in 1977 by Dublin-born photographer Alen MacWeeney. They do more than transport viewers back to graffiti-filled train cars; they create a disorienting atmosphere through his dark room printing method, which seamlessly combines two images into a diptych.

“I wouldn’t go in and take photographs immediately in a subway car because there’s too many people, too much going on,” MacWeeney said in an interview with Gothamist. “I’d have to let things settle. I would prefer to be the one in that car first. And the other people coming in were then my guests, and therefore they were fair game.”

Trains converge in the background. Columns appear too close together. Subway car windows are unusually close. The mashups aren’t obvious at first. But with further examination, the pictures take on new meaning and are arguably stronger as one.

When choosing how to combine images, MacWeeney said, he just went with his gut.

“That’s done entirely emotionally,” he said, speaking from his Upper East Side apartment. “You don’t make the obvious connections. You make the ones that seem to come alive.”

MacWeeney began shooting local news stories for the Irish Times when he was 16 years old. He was obsessed with his mother and sister’s fashion magazines, and reached out to an editor at Vogue in London who told him that if he wanted to work in fashion, he should take a picture of someone famous.

So, MacWeeney managed to photograph Orson Welles when he was in Dublin for a play.

From there he got a job as an assistant for Richard Avedon, the famous fashion and portrait photographer in Paris and New York. But it wasn’t until MacWeeney saw Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank’s seminal 1959 series, “The Americans,” which highlighted the reality of post-war America, that he decided to move on from staged fashion shoots.

“They had a level of truth that just didn’t exist in others. Avedon’s photographs were productions, they’re theatrical,” MacWeeney said. “Frank’s hit a core that was just unnameable, that was so profoundly true. And he didn’t have control of anything, he just perceived these photographs.”

MacWeeney returned home and documented the itinerant Irish Travelers. He recorded their stories and music, and then took their photos. The ethnic group’s live-for-the-moment ethos stuck with MacWeeney.

“They lived without any knowledge of what [the] next day brought,” he said.

It was a chance screening of a 1959 documentary called Broadway Express, shot entirely in the subway, with no words and synchronized to music that sent MacWeeney into New York’s transit system.

The film features scenes recognizable to today’s straphangers. Crowded trains. Fights. Downtrodden Musicians. Begging. Children dancing.

“It was just electrifying,” MacWeeney said.“I just found that it was almost like a theatrical confrontation. And that was ripe for photographs.”

He shot with a Leica camera using 35mm and 50mm film, good for low light and unobtrusive photography. He didn’t take any shots surreptitiously.

Other photographers have documented the transit system, like Bruce Davidson in his “Subway” series, which captured a similarly gritty scene in the 1980s. But unlike Davidson’s lurid color images, MacWeeney’s black and white diptychs turn the grime into something more glamorous.

MacWeeney recalled that when he first printed his images, he didn’t like them. Nothing was strong enough on its own. But as they piled up on the floor, he suddenly noticed something.

“When two prints fell on top of one another, I thought, wow, that looks actually better than either this one or that one. So then I started pairing them together,” he said.

Those images are what’s on display, for the first time publicly as a set, at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street. The exhibit runs through Jan. 7, 2024.