Mark McEvoy is being highlighted for photographing London Underground passengers in the 1990s, with the images showing punks, partiers and late-night lovers on Friday and Saturday nights. UK says the pictures capture city life before smartphones and before all-night services on some lines.
He took the portraits in London Underground carriages at around 11pm from 1992 to 1995. McEvoy said the underground train summed it up best: "We’ve all been there".
Mark McEvoy in Camden Town
McEvoy lived in a shared flat in Camden Town, north London, and described himself as “slightly hippy-ish, trendy, kind of casual, into funk, jazz and reggae”. He also said he “smoked a lot of weed”.
He said he was travelling home from Brixton when he was struck by the mix of people in the carriage, including different ages, races, sexualities and pop-cultural scenes. After that, he spent the next two years going underground around traditional pub closing time on Friday and Saturday nights to take pictures.
London Underground permission
Most of the pictures were taken only after McEvoy asked his subjects for permission. He found that usually they would pose for a shot and then carry on doing what they were doing before, which gives the archive its posed-and-spontaneous feel.
The images are rooted in their time by the old wooden-floored rolling stock, tube seat patterns and the fashions of London’s subcultures, including casuals, rockabillies, goths and punks. The lack of smartphones is striking because the photographs preserve a social scene that moved through London Underground carriages without the devices that now shape how late-night travel is recorded.
night tube
All-night services began on some lines 10 years ago this month, which places McEvoy’s archive in a late-night London that worked differently. For passengers, the practical value of the photographs is simple: they show how crowded, mixed and self-styled the carriages could be before the night tube changed some late journeys.
The open question is the scale of the archive. How many of McEvoy’s tube photographs exist in full is not stated.
