Monochrome Chronicles #04: Private Spaces

The topic for this episode of the Monochrome Chronicles may seem to be self-contradictory: the quest for privacy in a crowded metropolitan city. Assuming for the moment that people who live in cities do so by choice, it would seem reasonable that they would be inured to crowds. Lack of privacy might well be a trade-off for urban living.

This episode also will introduce my street photography. I mentioned street photography in the first two episodes, but this episode and the next several episodes will focus more deeply on this work. By the way, I don’t claim to be a “street photographer” per se but certainly this genre has had a strong influence on my work over the years.

I used to live in New York, a crowded, sometimes over-crowded, city. In residential areas, some city blocks were home to more people than the entire population of my home town back in Iowa. More than 4 million people would ride the subways every day. People, people, people were everywhere. New Yorkers need to adapt to the crowded conditions.

Now I live in Tokyo, which is crowded, too, but in a different way. Tokyo is overcrowded during the day but most neighborhoods are quiet at night. As for the subways, the busiest station Shinjuku Station, sees over 3 million passengers pass through every day. Yes, 4 million people ride the NYC subways every day, but in Tokyo 3 million people pass through a single station.

At the same time, people also occasionally need some private space. This is just human nature. Individuals may vary in the amount of privacy they desire, but the need is almost universal. How, then, can a person find private space in such an overcrowded city?

These thoughts have come to me now retrospectively while I have been searching through the photographs that I have taken while living in these two cities. I don’t know where this theme came from…probably it was there all along.

Among the images in my street photography I find examples of how people find private spaces – no, make that “create private spaces” – even as they go about their daily lives. This may seem to be a paradox, to find people enclosed in private spaces while they are on the street. After all, the streets are public places. People find private spaces even in public places.

To me, one of the most ironic observations is that riders on the subways are able to find private spaces there. Such private spaces are figurative rather than literal, a psychological adaptation of sorts. One of the important urban skills is the ability to carry an invisible shield to keep the public out of your own private space. There is an oxymoron there somehow, a private space in public.

Granted, this is my own personal interpretation of these photographs. As a photographer, it would be virtually impossible to know whether these subjects are actually experiencing private spaces. This is immaterial. Perhaps after all, I am only projecting my own perceptions onto what I find in the negatives and prints. That is my prerogative as a photographer. The world inside my viewfinder.

A scene in Lincoln Center. How often can one find someone alone at night in Manhattan? This guy was, or seemed to be, completely absorbed in reading the newspaper, sitting under a street lamp for illumination. As I watched, nobody else came near him. What a luxury, to be alone in the middle of a city of 8 million people.

A decade later and 10,000 km away I found this image that is complementary to the one from Lincoln Center in NYC. These telephone booths in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park…well, telephone booths have become almost extinct, so they are symbolic in this context. It is easy to imagine them as private spaces in this otherwise dark and silent park.
On the edge of the park late at night, this scene was eerily quiet. The image evokes a feeling of loneliness. Or is it mystery? It could be a feeling of fear. Or nostalgia, with the phone booth rapidly becoming a relic of an earlier era.
Strange to realize that this was part of metropolitan Tokyo at night. This image is atypical for me for the lack of people. Or maybe the people are implied, left to a viewer’s imagination.

Bryant Park, located behind the Public Library on 42^nd Street in NYC, is a busy place during the day. Office workers on their lunch hour, shoppers taking a few minutes to rest, people walking their dogs, and, yes, street people and drug pushers, too. City streets border the park on three sides so traffic noise is never far away.
This woman seemed to be oblivious to all these distractions. She was sitting quietly, apparently absorbed in her own thoughts.

“Loneliness” describes in one word this image of a young woman on the subway in Brooklyn. I imagined that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. But what was I doing riding the subway in Brooklyn? Maybe I was just following my camera, in search of street photography.
Rather than Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment” I should call this my “fortuitous moment.” Fortuitous in the sense that the sudden flash of bright lights from the platform tricked my camera into an exposure setting that made it seem like the interior of the train car was very dark. Serendipity in action. The off-kilter camera angle emphasizes her body language and gives a sensation of motion to the image. The end result is an image of wistfulness.

Hardly just another passenger on the subway. The simplicity of the composition in this image belies the substance therein. This man seems to have withdrawn into his private space but the story goes much deeper than that.
His body language suggests a level of self-confidence. The lighting on his face is the most magnetic element of the photograph. The reflected light on the wall behind him illuminates the scene, but still his face stands out. He seems to transcend the reality of the subway.

The experience of private space doesn’t necessarily require social distance from others. Each of these men was, in my mind’s eye anyway, wrapped in his own personal space. They had different manifestations of this, one immersed in his book and the other immersed in thought. Their body language clearly separates them from one another.

Reading a newspaper while riding on the subway is a common enough practice. What sets this reader apart is his body language. He is holding the newspaper almost like a shield. Hence his newspaper seems to set the boundary of his personal space.
As a street photographer, of course, it is impossible for me to know what is behind that newspaper. That is my prerogative, to interpret what I see according to my own point of view. Whether my interpretation is correct is beside the point. This image shows my point of view.

Even on the subway, or maybe especially on the subway, riders find ways to create private spaces. As the song goes, “People ride through a hole in the ground.” The reality is that the trains go hurtling through the tunnels at top speed, a decidedly artificial way to travel.
No wonder riders retreat into their private spaces. Maybe listening to music or other programs is a way to bring a bit of their own culture to an experience that is…well, definitely artificial and nearly surreal.

How different it is to ride the subway in Tokyo than it is in NYC, where the subways are crowded, noisy, dirty and sometimes dangerous. The subways in Tokyo too may be crowded but they are clean and quiet.
Nonetheless, this passenger created his own private space by using these studio-sized earphones. The look on his face, the gesture of his hands, and his whole body language reflect his retreat into personal space. The contrast between him and the woman next to him emphasize the difference between public and private space on the subway.

This woman wearing a dashiki clearly was lost in thought. The look on her face suggests she was in repose, though I doubt that was the case. Her face and her body language express dignity and self-confidence.
This photograph defies some of the stereotypes about the NYC subway, which would be characterized as dirty, noisy and crowded. In the image, the car appears to be clean, quiet enough for the woman to let her guard down, and certainly not crowded. Clearly, the subject here is the woman, and not the subway.

The photorealism of this image is deceptive. The private space is hidden. The people in this scene are far away in the background. An awkwardly tilted lamp post, a black garbage bag and an open door lie in the foreground. The midground, where the subject should be, is empty. Maybe this is the point of view of someone who is carrying the invisible shield.

At the NY Public Library on 42^nd Street one Saturday in late fall, probably I was taking photos for an assignment in my class at ICP. I had been concentrating mostly on the architecture of the library, when suddenly I turned around and saw this woman walking toward me. I shot several frames, largely without planning or design. Clearly, she was in her own world, maybe reminiscing about her past. The composition is purely coincidental, but works well.

An afternoon in Washington Square Park, it looks like autumn. This woman was, I imagine, a long-time resident from the neighborhood. Well-dressed, by herself, she seemed to be completely absorbed in her reading. The park attracted a host of other people, too. Nonetheless, this woman seemed to be oblivious to all that, absorbed in her book.

A coffee shop in Hachobori near the darkroom where I used to do my printing. This cafe was a hybrid between coffee shop and diner. When I saw this man quietly enjoying his coffee and a book, all the elements were right for a portrait. As an alternative to shooting from the hip, my approach was, literally, an under the table shot. This technique is rather hit-or-miss but sometimes works well. In this instance, the light is what distinguishes the image.

A public promenade along a river front might seem like an unusual place for a private space. Then, again, why not? The location itself is unimportant. The key element is the state of mind of the person enveloped in the private space.
The mood of this photograph is different from most of the others in this episode. Here most of the frame is taken up with middle grays, rather than the stark high contrast in the other images. The result is a more soothing, quieter atmosphere.

For this issue of the Monochrome Chronicles, I’ve chosen photographs taken over a long period of time – throughout my 25+ years behind the camera – both in NYC and Tokyo. Oddly enough, this series of photographs emerged retrospectively. Most of them were now-and-then casual shots. I didn’t plan this series, it just happened. This is different than serendipity, I believe. Once I finally recognized the trend, I began to search retrospectively for more images that portrayed people in private spaces. Maybe the motivation was there subconsciously all along. I don’t want to analyze this too deeply.

If this was not a conscious choice, then why did I take these photographs and why did I choose them for this episode of the Monochrome Chronicles? One answer, and maybe too facile, is this is part of my story. This is why I am writing these articles. The other answer is that I am somehow subconsciously compelled to take these photographs. My little voice tells me when everything is just right for a photograph. I have to do it, have to trigger the shutter. I don’t think, I just act. The series emerges later.

Gallery: Private Spaces

Monochrome Chronicles #04: Private Spaces

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