By Justin Franz
CHICAGO — The Chicago Transit Authority’s “L” system is a big, bustling urban railroad that many people — railfans included — overlook. Perhaps there’s no group more oblivious to how it works than the people who use it day in and day out. For them, it’s just part of their normal pattern of life, a vehicle that gets them from point A to point B and nothing more. But photographer Andrew Michaels is trying to change that.
This year, Micheals completed his new photography project “Familiar Faces,” a collection of nearly 200 images of the people who make CTA’s L work.
“I think if you asked someone (who regularly rides the L), they could tell you the trains aren’t moving by themselves,” Micheals told Railfan & Railroad recently, “but so many people just hop aboard and don’t think of the people making it all run.”
Micheals got into photography around 2014 in New York City. When he moved home to Chicago he started doing street and urban photography and frequently shot the city’s transit system. Today, he does portraits and wedding photography as well. Micheals said initially he used photography as a way to express himself but then he saw an exhibit from a French street photographer that focused on the people in his community.
Micheals also photographs the trains themselves. Photo by Andrew Micheals.
“Suddenly I felt very shallow,” he said, “I felt a need to create something bigger than myself, and I began storing notes on my phone as ideas would come.”
Included in those notes was a photo project on transit workers. Micheals initially thought he’d focus on bus drivers — trying to capture that moment when you make eye contact with the driver when the door opens — but with some 10,000 stops, that felt overwhelming. Then he thought of the L. He started photographing train operators at stations when they looked back on the platform to make sure everyone was on and off.
Organizing the photos and figuring out how to present them were some of the biggest challenges, Micheals said. Ultimately, he settled on laying out the photos on a map and then sharing them individually on social media. He hopes eventually to have the project displayed publicly. To see more of Micheals’ work, visit statestreetphotostudio.com or follow him on Instagram at @statestreetphotostudio.
