Mark McEvoy's pictures taken on late-night Underground journeys in the 1990s are richly evocative of time and place. Framing them in a piece for the Guardian, Luke Turner observes that McEvoy effectively documented "the last years of the fiercely tribal nature of British youth culture before it was flattened out by the internet, as streaming homogenised music tastes" - which makes them of significant historical interest despite being only 30 years old. He may not have known that seismic change was on the horizon, but he makes clear that the attempt to capture "the wide range of British culture in that space at that moment" was very deliberate. (In this respect, it's no surprise to learn that the pictures have been published as a Cafe Royal zine.)
Turner also notes that there are, of course, no smartphones on view. This is something I recently reflected on in relation to the above-ground street photography of Joan Piekny from the same era. While her concern was with how smartphones have fundamentally changed people's public behaviours, I pointed out that they've also "giv[en] anyone the means to take pictures in public without a giveaway long lens". It must have been obvious that McEvoy was wielding a camera, and so the fact that he managed to capture such candid scenes apparently without arousing the irritation or ire of visibly refreshed travellers is some feat.
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