Want Shots Like This? Get a Permit - nytimes

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January 7, 2005

Want Shots Like This? Get a Permit
By SEWELL CHAN

Graffiti-covered trains fill a Brooklyn subway yard, looking like row upon
row of comic strips. A weary passenger closes his eyes, his hands folded as
if in prayer. A young couple embraces in a subway car in front of an
advertisement that reads, "Don't Give Your Heart to Just Anyone."

Photographs of these separate moments have been exhibited or published over
the past year as part of a swelling of interest in the New York City transit
system, which celebrated its centennial in October. But the books and
exhibitions also coincide with a proposal by transit officials to ban
photography, as well as film and video recording, on subways and buses
without authorization.

The ban, which is intended to combat terrorism, will take effect as soon as
the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's board approves it.

Much of the attention on the ban has been focused on tourists who take
innocuous snapshots. But its most profound effects may be on the artists and
documentary makers chronicling life as it moves through the subway system,
even though officials say these artists could get permits to continue their
work.

"Somehow there is a certain honesty underground, a certain truth," said
Christophe Agou, a French-born photographer who lives in Manhattan and has
photographed the subways since 1997. He described the subway system as one
of the most poignant spaces in which to work. "To forbid certain locations,
and subject matters, somehow makes me very emotional."

Bob Shamis, curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of
New York, said the subways had enchanted photographers since Walker Evans
captured images of unsuspecting riders during the Depression. "It's a world
within a world," Mr. Shamis said. "It's just a place where you see humanity
exposed, in a way that doesn't often present itself. It's a special
situation within New York, a leveling out of people, socially, on the
subway. It's almost a playground for photographers."

Mr. Shamis said subways have been especially appealing to photographers
seeking insights into human character. "People let their guard down, in
terms of how they are seen on the subway, their demeanor and their stance,"
he said.

Most scholars agree that Evans, who died in 1975, was the first to use the
subway as a lens on society. From 1938 to 1941, he took some 600 photographs
of passengers, although the work was unknown to the public until 1966, when
the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of his portraits.

Perhaps Evans would have accommodated himself to the proposed photography
ban. He took his portraits from a camera hidden in his coat.

"He had the camera around his neck, resting on his chest, and a long cable
going down his sleeve to his hand," said Helen Levitt, 91, who lives in
Greenwich Village and who accompanied Evans as he took many of the subway
portraits. "So he just pointed his chest at whomever he wanted to shoot. He
didn't have to hold the camera up to his eye."

Ms. Levitt, who is renowned for her photographs of New York street life in
the 1930's and 1940's, said Evans's surreptitious technique had its
advantages. "There are numerous portraits you can take of people, especially
if they're not aware of you," she said.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Tom Kelly, said
the new photography rules were devised after extensive talks with the Police
Department, which is responsible for patrolling subways and buses.

"Nobody is looking to violate anybody's civil rights or deny anybody's
constitutional rights," Mr. Kelly said. "But when you check with law
enforcement agencies, they have uncovered photographs of subway and rail
systems from various terrorist organizations. And I don't believe they were
going into somebody's scrapbook."

The proposed ban comes at a time when subway photography has been celebrated
in numerous books and exhibitions.

Yale University Press recently reissued Evans's 1966 book of subway
photographs, "Many Are Called." Several of his subway portraits are
displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition called, "Few
Are Chosen: Street Photography and the Book, 1936-1966."

The Museum of the City of New York has an exhibition of subway-related work
by three photographers.

One of them, Bruce Davidson, a documentary photographer, took his own series
of transit photographs in 1980 and 81, after years of deferred maintenance
had left the subways scarred with graffiti and beleaguered by breakdowns.

"That was a decisive moment in the history of the subways, when things were
really bad," Mr. Davidson, 71, said in an interview. "Those photographs now
are history because the subway in many ways has improved over the years."

Last year, Camilo Jose Vergara, whose work is also on exhibition at the
Museum of the City of New York, published a book, "Subway Memories," that
includes photographs taken since 1970, when he moved to New York from his
native Chile.

Mr. Vergara, 60, said the environment for taking photographs had already
become more difficult - in part because of the ubiquitous transportation
authority signs and posters that state, "If you see something, say
something."

On several occasions, Mr. Vergara said, concerned passengers have accosted
him for taking photographs, even though the practice has not yet been
banned.

"Folks are deputizing themselves," he said. "They are out there, they are
the eyes that are trying to keep New York City safe. Those are even more
annoying to the photographer, I think, than the policemen. The policemen are
not going to punch you in the face, but some of these guys seem capable of
doing that."

Martha Rosler, a Brooklyn native who has been photographing the subways
since 1980, said the ban would be unenforceable, given technological
advances that have made cameras so small as to be imperceptible.

"The bizarre bureaucratic mind somehow thinks a terrorist needs to be
standing there with a visible camera to figure out a place to put a bomb,
when obviously technology has reached a point where tiny little video
cameras can have eyeballs peering out from your buttonhole," she said.

New York City Transit, the authority subsidiary that operates the city's
subways and buses, announced the proposed photography ban last May and
issued the proposed new rules in November. A 45-day public comment period -
required under state law - ends tomorrow.

After that, the proposal will be revised or submitted for a formal vote by
the authority board.

Mr. Kelly, the authority spokesman, noted that the ban would exempt
journalists with valid press credentials. He said that photographers and
documentary filmmakers would continue to have access to the subways by
applying for a permit. But neither the procedure for obtaining one, nor the
extent of access that would be granted, has been decided.

Mortimer L. Downey, the authority's executive director from 1986 to 1993,
said the value of the ban might lay primarily in giving the police more
leeway in questioning people with criminal motives.

"The likelihood that you're going to catch a terrorist taking pictures is
fairly slim, but conceivably you might, and it's certainly better to catch
him taking a picture than blowing up a station," he said.

The ban's enforcement could produce unintended results.

Not long ago, Mr. Vergara recalled, he was photographing pigeons that had
entered the Broadway Junction station in eastern Brooklyn, where five subway
lines meet. "Somebody just put out the word - and this is one of the large
stations that have police 24 hours," he said. "They went looking for me.
They caught up with me."

Two policemen, Mr. Vergara said, asked him what he was doing. "I said,
'Well, taking pictures of pigeons here.' That didn't sound very believable."

While Mr. Vergara tried to convince the policemen that his photography was
legitimate, another passenger began taking snapshots of the photographer
being questioned. That annoyed the officers, in Mr. Vergara's account:
"Right after they were done with me, they told me, 'We're going after him.'
"

Copyright 2005