When I first came across photographer Hannah La Follette Ryan’s Instagram account, @subwayhands, I scrolled and screenshotted again and again. I immediately knew I needed to paint these images.

My relationship with public transportation has been tumultuous. Growing up in San Francisco, MUNI and BART were the ticket to my freedom, my way home from school, and also a place where I held very little authority over my own body and personal space. I received an amount of harassment that was unfathomable to the peers I tried to talk to about it in college at UC Santa Barbara. My new friends from Los Angeles and Orange County couldn’t imagine a world where they “had” to take the bus every day and receive this horrid treatment. According to them, almost all they did was drive around. I was guarded, I was scared, I was prepared to defend myself, at any given moment for most of my time in high school and college. It was unfathomable to me how safe everyone seemed to feel. 

One day, after living in the guarded clutches of Santa Barbara for a while, I woke up and immediately thought to myself, “no one has cat-called me, spat on me, touched my body, told me the horrible things they want to do to me, since I got here.” I sat up, stretched my shoulders and walked outside. This time I didn’t take a look behind my shoulder every two minutes until I got to class. After class, I took the same route I came to class back home, knowing no one was following me. I knew that, maybe not everywhere, but here, I was safe. 

HLFR is able to do something I was not able to do on public transportation, pause to observe and make artwork from the inspiration she found observing people on the subway. When on public transportation I was trapped in self-protection mode. I didn't feel safe enough to feel inspired. When I felt an explosion of inspiration from looking at HLFR’s photos I knew they had come into my life as a healing tool. A photographer I have never met, on the opposite side of the country, gave me the entry point I needed to begin to repair my relationship with public transportation. 

As I paint these photos I am reminded of the stories each person holds, the resilience you’ll never be close enough to witness, the way their eyes light up when they see their favorite person. We don’t witness much of them, but we do get moments. We know the man on the late evening train is likely bringing that bouquet back to a lover or a friend. We know the way his cigarette is not fully smoked, but not lit, means he probably ran onto the train while it still was. We don’t know them, but we know these moments, so maybe, in a way, we do know them. I think we tell ourselves we don’t want to know each other, we know ‘stranger danger,’ but what about stranger love? What about when your heart rushes full when you see a woman a hundred or so yards away walking in just exactly the way your mother does? The more I get to be with these images, and the people in them, the larger my bank of strangers I love gets, and the less I feel scared.

I don’t want to be scared anymore. I want to love. So, I look, I pause, I listen, and I paint.