Since moving to New York City, in 2015, the photographer Hannah La Follette Ryan has documented the hands of the city’s commuters: fists gripping bags and phones and cash, lacquered nails, bitten cuticles, fingers curled around straps or interlaced or splayed out protectively against another body. The photos, which she posts to the Instagram account @subwayhands, are not staged: La Follette Ryan shoots the series primarily with her iPhone, while on her regular travels through the city, and most of her subjects are never aware that their hands are having their portraits taken. As one scrolls through her river of photos and videos, more than a thousand in all, the hands become alien and abstracted things, creatures that exist independently of the bodies that bear them. Individually, though, they are as intimate and readable as faces—maybe more so. “Especially in a public space, faces can be guarded and inscrutable,” La Follette Ryan told me. “Hands are expressive and reactive in a way that often feels more honest. We reveal a lot about ourselves through our nervous tics, the tension in our hands, our subconscious gestures.”
Recently, as the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated in New York City, La Follette Ryan has documented new emerging patterns: hands squeezing small plastic bottles of sanitizer, hands twisting around each other to work the slippery alcohol serum into the skin, hands vigorously wiping down phones. Hands wearing gloves. Hands clutching tissues. New York’s subways are the city’s arteries and veins. Even now, as health officials urge people to avoid crowded spaces, in order to slow the spread of the virus, and as some schools close, whole companies work remotely, and large gatherings are banned, the trains are still running, and people are riding—what else can we do? Many New Yorkers still have jobs to go to; there are still appointments to be met, and shopping to be done. Among those of us who have ridden the subway this week, there’s a new hyperawareness of the shared physicality of transit, of breathing the same air, touching the same card machines and stair rails and turnstile bars. Our hands are suddenly hazards, portals to take in—or transmit—something terrifyingly invisible. Sanitizer helps. Distance helps, too: waiting for uncrowded train cars, spreading out on the platform. “I never thought I’d live to see straphangers being so respectful of personal space,” La Follette Ryan said.
The hands that La Follette Ryan captures tell dense emotional stories; in their poses and grips, they take on the surreal semi-humanity of sculpture. (So evocative! So lifelike! They could almost be real!) They also, over months and years, tell collective stories of what we wear and carry: trends in manicured nails, watches, and rings; new models of phones and headphones. But the story told in her latest photos came on suddenly and is all-encompassing—a collective, simultaneous adjustment in how we interact with the city and with one another. The urgency of the moment has shifted “Subway Hands” from a work of unconventional portraiture to one of artful photojournalism.
A few days ago, while I was waiting on the platform at Times Square, to catch an express train to Brooklyn, flickers of lavender caught my eye, a brightness breaking the dark monotone of the crowd: nitrile gloves, obscuring the hands of perhaps one in every dozen commuters. The color is its own safety precaution: a vivid purple unlikely to be mistaken by a nurse or a doctor for any of the hues of the human body, or by a food-service worker for anything edible—a vivid distinction between object and barrier. In the subway, they flashed out from cuffs and shopping bags, like warning signs. I watched an older woman peel off her pairs and apply a dose of sanitizer to her palms. She scrubbed her hands together and then waved them in the air, to speed the drying of the alcohol, which glistened under the fluorescent lights. In “Subway Hands,” through the eye of a camera, the sheen of rubbing alcohol is imperceptible—hands scrub and flutter in dry choreography. The movements seem both neurotic and prayerful, less a mass act of containment than a mystical ritual. They’re a warding off of the evil eye, another superstition of the mass-transit age: hold your breath when you pass a cemetery, lift your feet when you drive over train tracks, clasp and twist and rub your hands when someone coughs nearby in the subway car.
What we do with our hands in the coming weeks and months is, in fact, a matter of urgent public health: according to many experts, the virus’s spread throughout the United States is now inevitable, but the more we can do to slow it down the better equipped our already strained systems will be to provide treatment and care to those who need it. Looking through La Follette Ryan’s catalogue can prompt an unsettling feeling of solitude: even in the throng of public transit, each of our bodies is only our own. But her new images, captured on the edge of a pandemic, also subtly upend that solipsism. Each frame focusses on just one individual, or maybe two—but their hands’ focussed, conscientious actions express a collective caution, and a collective care.
