A tremendous amount will be lost if photographers stop shooting in the subways.
The subway stations are some of the last vestiges of the old pre-Disney,
pre-cleansed New York. Times Square has been turned into a mall—and I have
very mixed feelings about the change. But when you step off the street and into
the Fourth Avenue R and F station here in Brooklyn, all that goes away. You're
instantly transported into the unreconstructed, unrenovated, ungentrified,
un-prettified New York of decades ago. You can walk through that entire
station—and it's just one example—and see almost nothing that wasn't there in
the '50s or '60s. Walk down a passageway in any of the older stations, and all
around you'll see what makes New York run—the pipes and conduits and
strangely-labeled doors, the barred cages where the workers hang equipment
and helmets and lamps, the huge steel beams that support the streets above,
dozens of layers of paint, unironic barely grammatical signs not composed by an
ad agency . . . I could go on and on.