'Many Are Called': Petals on a Wet Black Bough

'Many Are Called': Petals on a Wet Black Bough
"Walker Evans could not have hoped for a better place to do his job, and he knew it. In the winter of 1938, when he finally began a long-planned and self-assigned subway photography project (he called it ''a project for love'') he wanted to do nothing but look at the people. And the people, working hard to wrap themselves in solitude, were his ideal subjects: they wore the classic look that subway riders have always worn -- the not-quite-prepared-to-meet-the-faces-that-you-meet face, a combination of public awareness and private abandon that may be unique to public transportation, especially the underground kind. Evans saw this displacement of the urban mask in even starker terms. ''People's faces are in naked repose down in the subway,'' he wrote." By RANDY KENNEDY, October 31, 2004