More than 20 years ago the photographer Seymour Licht was on an assignment to capture images of the annual Halloween pageant in Greenwich Village. The floats and crowds at the carnival were hard to make sense of visually, and Licht’s eye was instead drawn to the individual ghouls and goblins he had seen on the subway getting there. The following year, and for two decades of October 31sts after that, he spent his Halloweens underground, from dusk until dawn, photographing gory Frankenstein’s monsters and bloodied angels and axe-murderers on their solitary way to and from parties. The collection of pictures has become a book, Halloween Underground: New York Subway Portraits.
There were nights when he would ride the subway for hours without getting a picture; other times deviant nuns and Dracula brides formed spontaneous pairings. By the time he took the woman with the hare’s head, Licht had perfected the contrast between “the mundane and the fantastical” that had first drawn him to the idea, isolating his surreal subjects against mass transit geometries and signage. We know this is fancy dress, but still it is hard to resist seeing the subway map on the wall as a guide to the hare’s subterranean fiefdom, a tunnel system into which the photographer has fallen.
You sense, looking through the book, that what began as a series of comic juxtapositions became over the years just a little more unsettling. As Licht writes: “Both the subway and Halloween have associations with death. The New York subway is located not ‘six feet under’, but about 180ft below ground at its deepest point. It can evoke a feeling of darkness, desolation and claustrophobia… ” Still, it was one of the rare occasions that strangers were more than happy to have a camera pointed at them, while their fellow passengers, Licht notes, this being New York, “hardly gave the spectacle a second glance”.
