When I’m on public transportation or walking through a transit hub, I am entrenched in the life of the city, the flow or the stoppage, the anxiety, watchfulness, boredom, and restlessness of what seems to be, well, everyone.
Public transportation is interesting. Full of new information, most of it conveyed visually, in clothing (shoes!), in the way a pair or a group mingle or huddle. It’s where I see how fashions and attitudes are aired and exchanged, however silently in the quick and discreet body language of strangers who come together in a train car or on a bus or a boat only briefly, strangers whose combined presence makes up the tenor of the city.
I always take pictures when I’m out and I take a lot of them on public transit. The photos below are an essay of travels around the city – only one of them is from New Haven. A lot of them are from the Staten Island Ferry, which begins and ends my trips into the city. Others are from buses, subways and subway stations.
Passengers and loiterers, the architecture of public transit, the social atmosphere of buses, trains and boats.
I have a thousand photos that help me understand these places. Here are just a few of them.
2019
Image at top of page shows two young men aboard the Staten Island Ferry. Summertime, sun, sea, an open window, and a smooth ride across New York Bay. All free of charge.