Eamon Dolan has been a book editor for over 30 years and the author of The Power of Parting. Raised by Irish parents in the Bronx, Eamon began posting subway photographs on his Instagram @eamondolan in 2015.
Eamon had been sharing pictures, mostly of the classic water tanks on the New York skyline.
And then, one day, he took and shared this photograph:
And in 2019, he wrote:
Four years ago today, I took this—my first subway photo—and it changed my life.
He talked about that caption: What did he mean, changed his life?
The one thing I realized pretty much immediately is that these two young women were kind of a metaphor for my own situation at the time. I had just separated from my ex. I was living in this tiny little apartment.…
Instantaneously, I started looking outward in a way that I hadn’t before…This really helped me get out of my own head in the right way, yet become self-aware in a way that I hadn’t been before, and that the right way for me at that moment to look inward was to look outward.
Here are some more images we discussed in our conversation:
And another father and son:
A serendipitous moment:
Books that caught his eye:
Eamon mentions that he is drawn to obvious contrasts on the subway. In this image, with its juxtaposition, he called it a “happy capture.”
I love pairings. I love two lovers or a mother and child or two strangers…
Those happy captures have become more rare since the pandemic:
there weren’t many of those pairings for a long time because there wasn’t that much traffic, so people weren’t required to sit, you know, strangers weren’t required to sit together, so they’re more spread out.
One of Eamon’s photos went viral after he and a stranger got stuck together on the elevator at the Clark Street 2/3 station — and an MTA worker rescued them.
The conversation begins with some parallel lines from the Paris Metro:
Also mentioned:
- “Mirrors and Windows” by John Szarkowski
I interviewed Eamon Dolan at The New School on August 10, 2023.