Falling up the up staircase

In a little piece of William H. Whyte-Jane Jacobs inspired fieldwork, filmmaker Dean Peterson gathered very interesting footage of people going up the stairs at a subway station he frequented in New York City. 

Apparently the MTA got right on it.

Hurricane Sandy and the subway

After Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012, the MTA in New York City made an effort to document the post-disaster impacts on the transit network. The agency was extremely proactive in getting real-time photographs out of the devastation and recovery efforts, but they'd started using social media to communicate with the public before the hurricane had reached the city:

Even before Sandy touched ground, the MTA began posting Flickr photos of the agency’s storm preparation: a tubular dam inflated at the West Side Yard, walls of sandbags stacked at MTA HQ, Grand Central and Penn Station evacuated and desolate. The first storm image came from a traffic camera inside the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel (formerly Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel), which revealed a road flooded with water. Posted on Oct. 29, the day of the storm, the photo is grainy but instantly powerful--one of the first images to reveal that Sandy was more devastating than anyone anticipated. With more than 144,000 views, it is the MTA’s most popular Flickr photo.

The MTA sent out a staff photographer to take pictures, but also asked employees to use their own devices to collect photos. It has has posted hundreds of photos of the hurricane's devastation on its Flickr feed.

The MTA's use of social media generally is quite impressive. In addition to Flickr, the MTA uses Twitter and has its own YouTube channel. Side note: A nice piece on YouTube called ONTIME: Grand Central at 100 highlights a collection of art pieces focused on the clock at Grand Central Terminal.

(via Co.CREATE)

Compressed on the Tokyo subway

Michael Wolf is a photographer whose collective body of work focuses on life in mega cities. He creates amazing, beautiful, and haunting visual representations of architecture, street life, domestic interiors, and - my favorite - people crammed in like sweaty sardines on the Tokyo subway in a series called tokyo compression.

he aims his camera at captive passengers pressed against the windows of the crammed tokyo subway. the density is no longer architectural but human, as commuters fill every available square inch of these subway cars. as with architecture of density wolf uses a ‘no exit’ photographic style, trapping the gaze of the viewer within the frame just as the passengers are unable to escape the confinement of these temporary cells. the images create a sense of discomfort as his victims attempt to squirm out of view or simply close their eyes, wishing the photographer to go away. tokyo compression depicts an urban hell and by hunting down these commuters with his camera, wolf highlights their complete vulnerability to the city at its most extreme.

In another series called street view, he finds photos in Google's collection of street view images from cities including Paris and New York. Many of these involve various modes of travel: 

using google’s universal interface, he navigates the french capital, cropping and blowing up isolated moments that are both evocative of the classic street photography of the 1950s, but which also transcend the distinctiveness of paris architecture to suggest an abstract, universal city.

I love Wolf's photography, and you'll likely get lost in his online portfolio. Other favorite series are 100x100, the box men of shinjuku station, and architecture of density.

(via Slate)

Miss Subways

Here's a really delightful piece from NPR's All Things Considered and Radio Diaries about the Miss Subways beauty contest that started in the 1940s:

For more than 35 years, riders on the New York City subways and buses during their daily commute were graced with posters of beaming young women. While the women featured in each poster — all New Yorkers — were billed as "average girls," they were also beauty queens in the nation's first integrated beauty contest: Miss Subways, selected each month starting in 1941 by the public and professionally photographed by the country's leading modeling agency.

The inclusion of women of color and Jewish women, particularly in those early years, is really quite remarkable.

(via All Things Considered)

Munich subway photos

A slideshow of photos by Nick Frank shows a deserted Munich subway:

Subway stations are typically drab, functional destinations--places where people come, go, and get on about their day. But they’re always a bit more than that, too. They’re spaces that reflect the personality of the city they’re in and often tell us something about the people who live there. I’m not sure, however, that the residents of Munich would like what their subway says about them. At least not as Nick Frank photographs it. His deftly composed shots show a subterranean infrastructure that’s gorgeously futuristic but also unshakably creepy.

The author of the article mentions zombie movies, and these photos did remind me of 28 Days Later right away - although zombies tend to wreak havoc and sully public spaces. They never leave places immaculate like this train car.

(via Co.DESIGN)