How does our experience as New Yorkers change when we visit neighborhoods beyond the orbits of our daily lives?
It's a question Brooklyn-based photographer Taylor Chapman has spent more than a decade exploring for his latest collection, "End of the Line," which documents the 44 unique communities that exist at the final stops of the NYC subway system.
Since 2012, Chapman has spent more than 262 days riding the 26 New York City subway lines to document life at the last stops.
"I've visited each one now at least twice, and most of them like three, four or five times. And they change always-- even if it's only been a year or so between the visits. It's sometimes shocking how much," he said.
The 11 final stops in Brooklyn include Bay Ridge 95th Street, Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue, Church Avenue, Prospect Park, Flatbush Avenue-Brooklyn College, Canarsie-Rockaway Parkway and New Lots Avenue, among others.
BK Reader met with the photographer recently at New Lots Avenue in East New York, where one of his favorite images — one of an overgrown lot underneath the subway line — was taken.
Chapman is a friendly Texan who travels the city with his cameras conspicuously slung around his shoulders and neck. He studied photography at Yale and spent years, while working as a teacher, documenting the places where he taught, including regions of the American South and rural Japan. The subway project was completed alongside his day job in consultancy and, now, climate tech.
"Over time, it became clear to me that it was important to do not just streetscapes, but portraits of people," he said. "Now, it's more about the people in the community that is forged by its proximity to perhaps the most iconic transit system on planet Earth."
He has a personal anecdote for almost every station he's visited.
He's met a pigeon breeder near a junkyard in Coney Island, the owner of the last Irish bar near the Bedford Park station in the Bronx and a WWII veteran at Brighton Beach who helped liberate Berlin. Once, a security guard let him up to the top of a 50-story building in Harlem to see the view, and another time he hung out with a group playing dice by the Prospect Park station.
"One thing I started doing over time was googling 'dive bar' when I got off the train, and finding the oldest bar in the neighborhood where I could typically find a few old-timers who are more than happy to talk about how the neighborhood has changed," he said.
The project was inspired by Chapman's rediscovery of his own home city, Houston, Texas, after college. After returning to participate in the Teach for America program, he was placed in a Houston school that showed him a part of the city he didn't recognize.
"There were just whole worlds within the city of Houston that I had no idea existed," he said.
When he moved to New York in 2011, he was determined to have a different experience.
An avid street photographer from age 16, Chapman decided "End of the Line" would be a great way to take photos while getting to know the city.
Since then, he has taken more than 50,000 images of subway stations and the characters surrounding them. He is currently in the final editing stages of a photo collection that will appear in an exhibition and a book.
The photographer said his work enriched his experience of New York and helped him to understand the city more deeply.
"I've witnessed a lot, and I also have been welcomed and treated well by so many different communities. It's been, frankly, very encouraging. I'm ultimately an optimist, and my experiences while doing the project are borne out of that."
Check Chapman's Instagram and website for the latest news on where to see "End of the Line" in publication.
