It's not the trains that are featured here, but the people on them. The Czech-born Peter's portraits follow in the tradition of Walker Evans's b&w shots of New York's underground public transit riders in Many Are Called
(to be republished this month by Yale), taken in the 1940s with a camera he kept mostly concealed in his coat. Peter put his camera in a bag that he kept by his side, also capturing whoever was sitting across the aisle without their knowledge. (The technique restricted him to shooting when the trains weren't crowded and he was neither blocked by standers nor forced to give up his bag's seat.) Despite being candids, his full-color shots of one or two figures in mostly empty cars are somehow taken with the tacit "I don't care what you do" knowledge of his mostly working-class subjects from New York's panopoly of cultures—most of whom are exhaustedly internally focused, sleeping, reading, kissing or familialy slumping over one another. Former poet laureate Billy Collins in his foreword calls their shared expression "subway face"—"that look of self-absorption, the middle-distance stare that suggests that life has temporarily been suspended," one that, any New Yorker will report, alters only at the greatest shock. (Oct.)
