At a time when travel to the world around us has become a dream rather than an easy choice, it may be a good moment to travel in another dimension: Time.
Looking at photographs of another day is more than an exercise in nostalgia; it helps us understand our place in time and how we got here, how the familiar to us was once new to the world.
Too often, though, those old photographs have an abstract quality to them. As artistic as they may be, those without people are, in a way, without soul or the ability to grab at the heartstrings. Eugene Atget’s beautifully composed photos of empty streets in Paris have never fully engaged me for that reason.
Other photographers have produced images centered on people, at home, at work, in struggle—think Lewis Hine, or Dorothea Lange. But the images in this story, by photographers who are practically unknown, provide an interesting blend of place and project blended with the workers making the project.
And they are nearly an accident.
At the turn of the last century, when New York was busy building its vast transit system, the construction companies hired a photographer, Pierre Pullis, to document the work, roaming the city to photograph the before, during and after of subway construction. Later joined by his brother Granville, they continued that work into the 1930s, eventually becoming the core of the system’s Photo Unit.
While not all their images contain people, or close views of workers, they form part of a mental web that includes them, in a way, even where they are not.
Most of the unit’s archives are now held by the New York City Transit Museum, and a selection of the Pullis’s work is having a special exhibit at the Museum. Although the museum is now closed due to the pandemic, the exhibit is schedule to remain through next January.
The images were made with large-format cameras using 8 x 10 film and high resolution lenses; even small details can be seen well in enlargements; they are a resource for architectural historians as well as other.
As for the Pullises themselves, there is not a lot of biographical detail. They lived lives nearly as anonymous as those of the workers they photographed; we don’t even know when Granville died, only that it was after 1940. Perhaps it was, in some way, that their own immunity to fame helped them make the human connections that show so well in many of the pictures.
Each image bears a careful record of its place in time and in the archive.
There are other puzzles here, too: the lower image above appears to be a tightly cropped portion of the upper (note the Chop Suey sign that is cut to only remnants of the P and Y) and yet a slight change of angle and elevation marks them as separate. The people and animals are the same; the photographer must have changed lenses, but why were both images needed?
A flooded tunnel under construction, or the entrance to Hades on the River Styx? A dramatic image in any case, more so than the scene below, during the construction of the station that now serves the Mets’ CitiField.
An interesting thought: None of these pictures was taken with the aim of creating art, but it is clear that the Pullis Brothers did so, nevertheless. How many other cities, how many other projects, have unsuspected archives like this?
Congratulations to ace detective George G, who identified the picture and the museum.
