Ethan Levitas is a graduate of Cornell University. His photographs are collected widely and exhibited internationally, including at the International Center of Photography and England’s National Portrait Gallery. Levitas is a nominee for the 2008 Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award. His work is frequently commissioned by The New Yorker magazine.

“I photograph the trains as individual subjects whose expressions and experiences bear witness to a particular time and a particular place. And then there are the passengers. Though the trains are always moving (while I photograph), I feel inextricably linked to the individuals inside. Each individual is alone but with me—connected—if only for an instant. Yet in this moment, and in the sum of all these moments, there is the seed of something larger and impossibly tangible. This is just to say: ‘We.’”

- Ethan Levitas

Since 2004, Levitas has photographed the elevated lines of the New York City subway in Brooklyn and Queens, creating portraits of individual train cars and the passengers within. Untitled/This is just to say deals with the life of the city in terms of passage: the passing of seasons and time, people and places. Levitas captures the unexpected moments of beauty, connection, and contradiction that occur between the individual and the collective, and between interior and exterior, in this most obvious and overlooked of public spaces. Subverting our expectations of perspective and scale, the trains become microcosms of the city (and the windows to its soul) as the project functions to collapse the distinction between our private and public selves.

This is just to say is a reference to a poem by William Carlos Williams, who used common language to create poetry from everyday circumstances.