Although the subway system is New York City’s bloodstream, most riders rarely slow down to wonder where the giant metal cars came from, or where they go after their last stop. Now, a new photography exhibit is transporting passersby into the spaces where the city’s subways and buses reside when they’re off duty, and even the spaces where they’re made.
Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design, In Service: MTA Photographs by Christopher Payne is the agency’s first systemwide photography exhibition capturing a behind-the-scenes look into the machines of NYC’s transit system.
Presented in 52 light boxes, the large photographs are displayed across five locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn: Grand Central Madison, Grand Central Dining Concourse, 42 St-Bryant Park, Bowling Green, and Atlantic Av-Barclays Ctr.
A resident of Inwood, Payne was captivated by the 207th Street Overhaul Shop, a nearby 43-acre complex where subway cars go to be repaired. Built from the late 1920s through the early 1930s, the shop services the R62 trains—the stainless steel orange-seated cars that ride the numbered lines. He became fixated on entering 207th Street and other overhaul shops around the city to see the cars stripped of their elements.
The documenting of these spaces began as a personal project, before becoming the basis for a story for The New York Times. Eventually, it led him to work with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to get unprecedented access to shops across the city as well as the other factories around the country that help build New York’s transit cars.
The exhibition features images like a partially assembled car at a subway train factory in Nebraska, a moment of friendship between workers in a bus factory in Minnesota, and simpler photographs from a locomotive factory in California for the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) and MetroNorth.
“I loved sort of being an ambassador of New York City and being able to say to the people making these vehicles that we use every day, you know ‘I ride that every morning’ and ‘that’s where I sit’,” Payne tells Fast Company.
Payne’s work often takes him behind the scenes of factories and restricted areas. These places are filled with large equipment and create a visual chaos that translates to interesting photographs. He describe his approach as finding the “aha, that’s how they did it” moment.
The resulting photographs are carefully composed vignettes. They’re not candid, but rather “styled, not staged,” as Payne puts it.
He often walks into rooms, trying to capture the large size of the machines, looking for shorter factory workers who might make the scale more pronounced. Other times, the photographs are meant to capture the human moments among the great machines. In one case he spotted a man wearing a bright tie-dye shirt, standing out against other workers.
“There was a young woman working with him and she piped in saying, ‘Oh, I made that shirt for him,’” Payne recalls. “All of a sudden I had this great shot. Without them, it would have just been this empty bus, but with them, it was like these two people who have this relationship and it all sort of fit.”
The photographs at each subway stop tell a different sliver of these machines’ story. At Grand Central Dining Concourse, the photographs illustrate the humans in the system’s infrastructure, displaying portraits of workers at overhauls and factories. At Grand Central Madison, the images showcase scale, with images from the MTA’s five operating agencies. At Bryant Park, the photos focus on everyday components of the system; at Bowling Green, the images capture the stages of a bus from manufacturing to maintenance. And at Barclays Center, the photographs follow the lifecycle of a Kawasaki R211 car, made in Nebraska and maintained in Yonkers.
But within those different stories, the installations aim to capture a system at a “peak moment of elegance,” to honor the workers’ craft, Payne says.
“If you think about someone who works in a factory, no one really cares what they do most of the time. When I show up, to me, they’re the most important people in the world,” he says. “If I don’t honor them, then I’m not doing my job.”
