The New York City subway has served as subject matter for countless photographers. Walker Evans made groundbreaking covert portraits of transit riders in the 1930s. Bruce Davidson documented the dangerous place it had become in the 1980s. Helen Levitt looked at the subway as a great equalizer. Tourist snapshots, fashion spreads, and on and on. To this day the New York City subway with its vast labyrinth of tunnels and millions of riders proves to be endlessly fascinating photographic fodder.  

When construction began in 1900 on the first underground rapid transit line in New York City, transit officials hired Pierre Pullis as the project’s official photographer. Joined by his younger brother, Granville, the older Pullis had earned a reputation for making photographs “as interesting as they are difficult to obtain,” according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1901. Using cumbersome cameras and glass plates, the Pullis brothers made tens of thousands of photographs of the construction sites, stations, equipment, and people who built the subways. He clamored over rocks and rubble, even using a flashlight to illuminate scenes while standing knee-deep in a sewer.

The Pullis brothers approached their work methodically, revisiting sites to record progress, and keeping a detailed log book of the date, location, land use, and other relevant information for each session. As the subway system expanded, more photographers were tapped to document it, but the Pullis photographs, as they have come to be known, are by far the most informative and artistically striking. Pierre continued to photograph the construction of the subway through the 1930s, stopping just before his death in 1942.

The Pullis photographs serve as records of what the streets and building façades looked like during construction. Unlike other surveying photographers of the era, the Pullis brothers chose to highlight the workers and pedestrians, portraying them almost heroically. This artistic decision breathed life into their pictures, showing the vibrancy of a city undergoing immense changes.

A remarkable and vast archive of images documenting the birth of New York’s subway system now belongs to the New York Transit Museum. A selection of the Pullis photographs is on view in Streetscapes & Subways: Photographs by Pierre P. and Granville W. Pullis through January 21, 2021.