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Ethan Levitas is a graduate of Cornell University. His photographs are collected widely and exhibited internationally, including at the International Center of Photography and England's National Portrait Gallery. Levitas is a nominee for the 2008 Rencontres d'Arles Discovery Award. His work is frequently commissioned by The New Yorker magazine.

Since 2004, Levitas has photographed the elevated lines of the New York City subway in Brooklyn and Queens, creating portraits of individual train cars and the passengers within. Untitled/This is just to say deals with the life of the city in terms of passage: the passing of seasons and time, people and places. Levitas captures the unexpected moments of beauty, connection, and contradiction that occur between the individual and the collective, and between interior and exterior, in this most obvious and overlooked of public spaces. Subverting our expectations of perspective and scale, the trains become microcosms of the city (and the windows to its soul) as the project collapses the distinction between our private and public selves.

This piece, Untitled, is currently on display in the Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City exhibition at the New York Public Library. Read our listing for more info.

Ethan Levitas
Untitled/This is just to say
Courtesy the New York Public Library

View more images! Take a look at Artkrush's most recent slideshow and Activate's The Week in Pictures.