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Look how well all those people are dressed, and in an era when a nice suit cost ten times what it does today in relation to incomes.

What drove people to invest so much in looking nice and formal in public? I wonder if it was the same force that kept people from destroying those nice woven seat cushions -- they'd be in shreds today or stink of dust and infestations like BART seats.

Anyway, I wouldn't dress up that nice for a job interview or a first date, but regular working people are investing more than I would spend on a car to go out in nice clothes every day. I don't understand what socioeconomic forces drive that kind of commitment to the particular and narrow common good of a well dressed public impression.

Clothing in general has become much cheaper, though. I can buy a new pair of jeans for an hours' labour at UK minimum wage. A t-shirt for 1/3 of that.

A more relevant example than income, would be comparing the differential between casual clothing and formal clothing.

One thing that always strikes me is that this clothing looks to be extremely high quality compared to what is on offer today (except perhaps at the high end). Some of those coats look fit to last a lifetime.

Kubrick was an amazing photographer; his glory as a cinematographer eclipsed his first career but that's too bad.

I too try to "record spontaneous action"; here's a series about tourists taking selfies before the Eiffel Tower:

http://smugmug.bambax.com/Street-Scenes/Selfies/n-zMzRw/i-Ww...

What do you think?

One of my favourite groups on Flickr is 'Pisa Pushers' - pictures of all the people doing the pose where they hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa:

https://www.flickr.com/groups/pisapushers/pool/

This is great! ;-))
I think those are very good. And oh my, people are actually using those selfie-sticks?
Thanks. Yes, they do, a lot. Even when they're not alone, they want to take a picture of their whole party and they do it like that.

It used to be that you asked someone to take your picture with your camera, but not anymore!

Tourists are self-reliant now. They're in a kind of bubble, they have their own bottle of water, they don't ask for directions because they look it up on their phone, etc.

Selfies are, fundamentally, PR; you're not shooting the Eiffel Tower, or even a souvenir of the time when you were in Paris; you're showing off for your friends, and you're in complete control of the frame, yourself, and even the moment when the shutter is pressed.

What I'm trying to do is show how all of this works, in a manner of speaking, "behind the scenes".

for me, those things completely take away the spontaneity of the selfie.

"Um excuse me, let me get my camera positioned properly on the stick, here, and uh, give me just a second here, alrighty, now lemme just extend this out to arms length and. ."

I like them! It's playful. You're getting people posing for a camera, but not your camera. Some shots are both awkward and endearing. Thumbs up.
> You're getting people posing for a camera, but not your camera

Thanks, yes, I hadn't thought about that but it's true!

I really enjoyed the 4th photo in the series. The strong white background really helps evoke the scene.
Thanks; it does have a lightness to it...
That picture of all the bus riders with their heads down in the newspaper... The more things change the more they stay the same. And people ignored each-other in tight spaces long before the smartphone came along.
There's a similar image of commuters on a train reading their papers that I love [0]. Even with smartphones there are a lot of people that continue to read the paper on the London Underground (probably because several are provided for free on the way in, but it's still interesting that people choose it over their phone).

[0] http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/commuters-reading-their-newsp...

> but it's still interesting that people choose it over their phone

For one thing, there's no mobile signal in the tube, and the wifi there is, isn't cheap and only covers stations. I have access to the wifi through my mobile plan, and I still prefer reading offline content on my tablet or Kindle.

With a bit of work it should be possible to track "circa 1955" down to a more exact date by browsing through the Philadelphia newspaper archives. I wonder when image search will be able to do this, if it hasn't already.
Except for the second last image of the two men sitting and the women standing up giving them the gas face. Priceless.
I remember those woven seat cushions from my youth, especially on the IRT line, so they were still used probably until some time in the '70s, when all the seats were replaced with hard plastic in garish colors.

These are good. It's hard photographing in the subway. Kubrick is well known as a talented photographer - remember how 2001 opens, with a series of still landscapes. And Barry Lyndon, where every frame is a gorgeous composition, sometimes forming an homage to a famous painting.

There was a recent exhibition of train and tube photos from London, and it was amazing to see how smart dress from the mid century gave way to fashions of the time like mods, teddy boys, punks, skin heads, new wave romantics, goths,hipsters, and finally back to a more stylish approach. No one looked happy though. Public transport is a great leveller - we all feel equally trapped and unhappy upon it!
I love how unchanged the IND is. Canal Street has a new floor, but the wall still looks identical.

(Is the long escalator High St.? If so, they have swapped the up/down directions since 1946. Edit: Probably not; looks like there are actually three escalators there with no staircase in between, while the current configuration is Down Up Stairs Up.)

These are really cool. It's amazing that Kubrick is as good at telling a story through photographs as he is at crafting one in a movie. The two mediums always struck me as being so unique from each other, that I wouldn't have thought that you could translate between the two.