The mundane bliss of New York’s subways in the ’70s

NYC Passengers 1976-1981 — During a very different decade in NYC, which bounced between rich creativity and sketchiness, photographer Joni Sternbach captured the idiosyncratic isolation found on its rail networks.

In 1972, Joni Sternbach returned to the Bronx, the borough of her birth. From her fifth-floor apartment on the Grand Concourse, she watched the trains roll up and down the elevated tracks, the sound of rolling thunder bringing back childhood memories. “When riding it as a kid, I always wanted to be in the first or last car so I could see the track ahead of or behind me,” Sternbach says, drifting into a poetic reverie of summer days and nights, when trains had wicker seats and sliding windows.

Then 18, Sternbach enrolled at the School of Visual Art and naturally gravitated towards the dark room. That fall, the Museum of Modern Art presented the first posthumous Diane Arbus exhibition, the uninhibited displays of personality matched only by Arbus’s unwavering gaze. “I was inspired by her nerve and directness in her picture,” says Sternbach, who would go on to craft her own chronicle of the New York underground in NYC Passengers 1976-1981 (Café Royal Books).

The first photograph Sternbach made in the series was of two couples lost in each other’s charms, their effortless beauty and glamour the stuff of Hollywood films. “These couples were aware that I was taking their photo, but I think they found it amusing or felt complimented by the attention,” says Sternbach, who submitted the picture to a contest in the Village Voice. “It won second prize, by their photo editor Fred McDarrah. That emboldened me to continue shooting,” she says.

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A black-and-white image showing a nun embracing a woman on a subway carriage. Graffiti can be seen on the walls behind them.

Black and white image showing four people sitting on a bench in a subway carriage. Two men and two women are visible, with the women sitting closely together in the centre of the frame.

As a young woman determined to make it on her own, Sternbach remembers ’70s New York as a “Wild West” that was equal parts creative and precarious. “It was a time of experimentation and because the city had poor areas, the real estate was cheap. One could be an artist, have a meaningless job and make their work,” says Sternbach, who worked part time as a salesgirl at Macy’s and later as a waitress in a Chelsea restaurant.

But Sternbach remembers feelings of loneliness and vulnerability as a teen on the brink of adulthood. “I felt that my camera was a sort of protection for me and that making pictures was an antidote to my problems,” she says.

The result was an act of devotion exemplified by her portrait of a woman from Clark Street Station, who Sternbach imagined as a character straight out of an Edward Hopper painting. They kept similar hours and were often on the same train. “When I noticed her sitting opposite me one evening, I couldn’t believe my luck,” Sternbach says. “I made several pictures of her and even raised the camera to my eye, which I did not do for every photograph.”

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Reviewing her contact sheets, Sternbach realised her photographs on the train captured the curious paradoxes of New York life. “It was a gathering place where hundreds of people passed through and there was a lot to look at and parse,” she says. “I think I projected my loneliness and yearning for closeness upon the many people I photographed.”