notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Lineposters, prints of city transit systems around the world, for sale at Etsy.

(Source: lineposters)

theidiotsheet:

steven meisel for vogue italia, 8/02

(Source: foudre, via saintfactory)

Q. This is the much-talked-about photo, on Page 91, with a man in a red jacket holding a gun up to someone’s head …

A. New York magazine called me, and they were doing a story on a series of subway undercover detectives, who dressed themselves and behaved in certain ways to entice muggers.

And one detective was dressed as a rabbi with a beard, and he wore a gold chain. Of course, rabbis don’t wear chains, but the robber probably didn’t know that. I volunteered, since I had been mugged previously when I was alone… . I volunteered to be a decoy so, I acted in such a way to get mugged. Now, I always had my camera out around my neck when I took pictures because I can’t just hide the camera and then approach people. It has to be out there, in the open. I took a subway map out and pretended I was lost.

The robber came into the car, robbed the sleeping rabbi/detective — took his chain right off his neck — and came towards me at the end of the car. He said, “Give me that camera!” And just at that moment, I lifted my camera and photographed him. And as I photographed him, [the detective] Billie moved in with the .38 and arrested him, so it was a simultaneous thing. One frame.

Q. So what we’re seeing, the gentleman in red is actually a police officer.

A. Yeah, he’s an undercover. And you see, he’s sitting there in the middle of the train with a boombox and dark glasses in that kind of hip-hop clothing, and the robber [thinks], “Oh, I got a brother. He’s going to help me. He’s not going to say anything.” And that was his fatal error.

The group was disbanded after awhile because the bait was too good. Sometimes the cops looked so good, I was going to rob them myself.

Q. What happened afterward? Are there other images from the incident?

A. He was arrested, and I felt sorry for him. As soon as he robbed me, they took him out and cuffed him. They took him right off the train at 42nd Street.

Then, I felt I couldn’t photograph him being arrested at that moment. I didn’t feel comfortable doing that, because he was cuffed and helpless.

— Chicago Tribune interview with photographer Bruce Davidson

(Originally posted to mlkshk by zarate)

This photo is from Tokyo Compression, a new book by Michael Wolf. I became aware of it from an article in the Guardian, but the photo above is from a German article (via). As Justin McCurry writes,

it is the ability to tolerate an elbow in the back and a cheek unceremoniously pasted against a window that sets Tokyo’s commuters apart. There are few arguments, and fights are almost unheard of; it’s as if the powerless, massed ranks of the travelling public have entered into a non-aggression pact – and one that is observed, for the most part, in near silence.

Winding up next to the Guardian article in Instapaper was a great post by 3 Quarks Daily entitled Tokyo, Almost-encouters, and “Passing by”:

Everyday, 3.55 million passengers are sent round and round Tokyo in a dizzying twenty-one mile subway loop called the Yamanote Line. The entire New York City Subway System, by comparison, spreads its 5.5 million daily  riders out over thirty-two times as much track.

At each of its twenty-six stops, passengers don’t exactly pass-through the ticket-gates, instead, they are pressed-out in batches, like loaves of bread through a bread-slicer. When you step onto this thronged train-line in the morning, it’s safe to assume that by day’s end, dozens upon dozens of friends, colleagues, past lovers, and future muses, will have passed through the same small square inches of this immense city.

The New York Subway, by Mitra Nataraj, a winner of the Guardian’s Been there photo competition.

buzzandersen:

Subway, lifeblood.

(via Whitney McNamara)

I posted about the Bruce Davidson photos at Tate Modern recently. If you like them, you might like the other NYC subway candid photos that Sean Kernick collated. (A reminder: if you can get to Southwark, it’s worth finding the Davidson room. Really.)