Overexposed? NYC Weighs Subway Photo Ban

NEW YORK, Feb. 26, 2005 — -- The subway is like the city's subconscious, threading all the neighborhoods together, photographers say.

"The subway becomes sort of the symbol of life -- always moving," says Camillo Vergara, who has spent 33 years photographing the subway.

"The subway was my studio," says Bruce Davidson, another photographer. "It was my blank piece of paper. It was my novel I wanted to write."

But such inspiration soon may be off limits to amateur photographers and may require professionals to go to the trouble of getting special permits. New York City officials are considering a general ban on photography inside the subway system in hopes of making it harder for terrorists to plan an attack.

If that happens, some say an important artistic tradition could be lost -- and for no good reason.

Since the 1930s, photographers have used the way the subway gathers and concentrates humanity. Book after book of subway photos have presented studies of personalities caught off guard -- sometimes with deeply meditative faces, lost in mental suspension before they arrive. Davidson's work includes the graffiti-laden subways of the 1980s.

"I think it's just the beginning of repression, of not allowing photographers as artists or as photojournalists to explore our culture and our times," Davidson says. "I think that forcing a law about photography in the subway is running scared."

Below Times Square, amid the tourists always taking snapshots of subways, you might glimpse professional Vergara, who's spent three decades making subway moments permanent. He says a ban due to a post-9/11 climate of suspicion, even if he had a special permit, would be intimidating.

"The suspicion erodes a sense of community, a sense of friendship and a sense of citizenship," Vergara says.