Room Guide

Room 7
Passengers

Public transport has always been a favourite place for photographers to catch subjects unaware. Nowhere else in the city do people brush up so close to one another and yet so studiously ignore each other. ‘I have always associated the underground with incredible intimacy among people, without them wanting to be intimate with each other’, Wolfgang Tillmans explains. His sensual series of close-ups on the tube was first shown in an issue of The Big Issue that he was invited to guest edit.
However, it was Walker Evans who first using a concealed camera to photograph passengers on the New York subway between 1938-1941. His portraits show people lost in private thoughts while aware of being in a very public place.
In the 1970s, Cindy Sherman took a different approach. Remembering characters she has seen on buses, she impersonated each in a series of studio self-portraits. She made no attempt to present this as a documentary project – staging is made evident in every picture by the presence of the shutter release lead.

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Wolfgang Tilmans
Circle Line, 2000
Galerie Daniel Bucholz, Cologne © Wolfgang Tillmans

• Other works in this room
  • Wolfgang Tillmans (1968 Remscheid, Germany, lives and works in London)
    Circle Line, Central Line, Central Line Suit, Victoria Line, Piccadilly Line, Jubilee Line, 2000      
    C-prints, each 40.6 x 30.5 cm
    Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne
    X22704   X22705   X22707   X22709   X22710   X22711
  • Robert Frank (1924 Zurich, lives in Nova Scotia and New York)
    Six photographs from the series From the Bus, New York, 1958, 23.5 x 34.3 cm, 33.6 x 22.9 cm, 34.3 x 23.5 cm, 26.1 x 17.8 cm, 34 x 24.5 cm, 26.5 x 17.7 cm  
    Courtesy the artist
    X23553 - 58
  • Cindy Sherman (1954 Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York)
    From the series Bus Riders, 1976
    #2, #4 #6 #7 #10 #14 #15 #13 #9,printed in 2000, each 25.4 x 20.3 cm
    Hamburger Kunsthalle
    X23059 - 67
  • Walker Evans (1903 St Louis, Missouri – 1975 New Haven, Connecticut)
    Subway Portraits, 1938–41, printed 1959
    16 photographs on cardboard, each 6.6 x 4.8 cm
    The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
    X22721, X22724, X22727, X22732, X22738, X22834, X22833, X22832, X22746, X22745, X22743, X22742, X22740, X22854, X22853, X22852, X22851, X22850, X22849, X22848, X22847, X22846, X22845, X22844, X22843, X22842, X22841, X22840, X22839, X22726, X22734, X22835, X22836, X22838, X22837