MTA fills 52 retired ad lightboxes with Christopher Payne’s photos of its hidden workshops

Commuters at five major transit hubs can now see where the city’s buses and subway cars are built, repaired and rebuilt. MTA Arts & Design unveiled “In Service: MTA Photographs by Christopher Payne” on Tuesday, Sept. 22, with 50 images on 52 retired advertising lightboxes.

This is the first time the agency has shown one photographer’s work across its entire network. Payne took his camera to 13 locations in four states, a mix of MTA sites and manufacturing plants, and the series follows the labor and coordination behind everyday service.

Where to see the MTA photo exhibition

Every hub has its own theme. The 10 lightboxes at Grand Central Madison convey how big the system is, drawing on work from all five of the MTA’s operating agencies. The Grand Central Terminal Dining Concourse, with 20, holds portraits of people in maintenance and manufacturing spaces. At 42nd Street-Bryant Park, seven lightboxes take a second look at ordinary components through Payne’s style. The seven at Bowling Green trace a bus through its life: frames get welded, accessibility ramps get installed, and each route ends with a wash. Subway cars are the focus of the eight lightboxes at Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center. Kawasaki is building R211 cars in Nebraska, the new cars go through trials in Yonkers, and the overhaul shops keep them in shape afterward.

One scene, taken in Maspeth, Queens, at the bus shop known as Grand Avenue Central, shows a city bus lifted off the ground with no wheels while crews work underneath. Inside the Coney Island overhaul shop, Payne pictured worker Conrad Samuels as he repaired a subway car’s wheel-motor gearbox, a task that demands real skill and time.

How the subway photo series came together

The project grew from an earlier Payne series, “MTA Overhaul Shops,” made inside the agency’s repair shops on 207th Street and in Coney Island. Ten photos from that work anchor the new show. Arts & Design commissioned the other 40, which Payne made between May and August of this year. In all, he had access to MTA sites for about five months.

“Most riders never see the system or the workers behind their commute,” Payne said. “This was my chance to show them.”

The agency began turning decommissioned ad lightboxes into rotating photo displays in the 1990s and booked one exhibition at a time. Showing a single artist at several hubs at once is a pilot for a new model, and it comes as the program marks its 40th anniversary.