Subway and the Ramblings of a Mad Photographer

  No matter in Philadelphia or New York I love the subway. Traveling underground where it's always nighttime, without the sun, brings a calmness to me while to most people it brings anxiety and chaos. I've photographed the subway several times. Some in color, some in black and white. Sometimes empty and sometimes at rush hour. Some feel like a documentary, while others feel like a dream. But my favorite are the ones that I took almost a decade ago with the original Ricoh GRD camera, they're a dream. To me, that's my subway.

 I've never been obsessed with camera gear and I've always tried to use whatever I could find for next to nothing and when it broke or no longer served a purpose, I moved on without giving a second thought. BUT... 6 years ago I did something extremely stupid and several times a year that stupidity rears its ugly head and pisses me off to no extent. That was the selling and giving away of all my 2005 Ricoh GRD1 cameras and supplies. A total of 8 cameras! It's was stupid, stupid, stupid!!! But I truly thought, at the time, that I had to move on from that type of photography. I was moving out of my center city loft, and I wasn't finding the city all that interesting anymore, so why did I need those cameras, if my photography was going to change with my new more banal living environment, and for a while it did.

 That camera for 14 years was an extension of my arm. I didn't need the LCD screen to be on to compose my photographs because it became second nature to me. And I knew what to expect from every single photo that I took with it because I knew the cameras strengths and weakness, and to this day I have not been in sync with any other camera since my days of film photography.

My periods of grieving and anger over the loss of the GRD(s) have been coming more frequently over the last two years.

Photos (24) taken in Philadelphia's subway from 2013-2017 with the Ricoh GRD camera from 2005.