Hell on Wheels: Photographing the MTA at the dawn of the 1980s

How a young Swiss photographer named Willy Spiller captured a lost microcosm of New York on the subway in its grittiest era

By Bill Shapiro

In May of 1977, a 30-year-old Swiss photographer named Willy Spiller, newly arrived in New York City and recovering from the one-two punch of jetlag and a night in the notorious Chelsea Hotel, descended the steps of the city’s subway for the first time.

What he saw was terrifying.
And electrifying.
And, truth be told, addicting.

Willy Spiller/Hell On Wheels

Beginning that week and continuing for eight years, Willy Spiller brought his camera on the subway, and he shot. He shot cops and robbers. He shot the fashionable and the indigent, commuters and kids. He shot the unpredictable dance of strangers interacting in tin-can train cars. He shot the beginnings of stories whose ends he left to our imaginations. Film was expensive, so he chose his moments carefully; still, over the years, he amassed some 2,000 frames.

Despite having mainly photographed local events for a weekly newspaper in Zurich (which, at the time, had a population that was less than a tenth the size of New York’s), Willy Spiller quickly came to understand that there is nothing more New York than its subways, each car a sweaty, rattling microcosm of the city itself — a loud, crowded, colorful melting pot where everyone is thrust into everyone else’s business.

Willy Spiller/Hell On Wheels

The result of Spiller’s eight years of subway photography was a slim, softcover book with a name — “Subway New York” — that sounded more like a city-sponsored freebie guide than the work of a sharp-eyed artist with masterful camera-handling skills; printed only in German, it was published in 1986 and noticed mostly by critics, who were impressed. Thirty years later, in 2016, the book was redesigned and released with the considerably more provocative title “Hell on Wheels.” This time, it caught fire; “Hell’s” initial printing sold out in weeks. Since then, the book has been much sought after and difficult to find. You might stumble across a copy on Amazon, but it will cost you $2,300.

Willy Spiller/Hell On Wheels

Which brings us to the new edition of “Hell on Wheels,” available on June 26, from Edition/Gallery Bildhalle. The title remains the same, but something remarkable, something unexpected, happens when you look at the photos today, 40 years after the fact. The distance that time has afforded lets us see the pictures in a wholly different light: with the ache of nostalgia rather than the pulse of fear.

Willy Spiller/Hell On Wheels

“The pictures are the same,” Willy Spiller says. “They don’t tell you what you have to feel.” And that, of course, is true. It’s New York that’s changed. While a photo freezes an instant in time, we can only approach that image from the moment we’re in now.

Spiller’s time-capsule photos speak to us of long-gone artifacts that once lived underground: newspapers (replaced by iPhones), boom boxes (replaced by ear buds), cigarette ads (replaced by ads for dating apps), subway tokens (replaced by our own credit cards). His pictures remind us that, some 20 feet below the street, you could once buy popcorn and “freshly squeezed” orange juice (39 cents for a small) or play a shooting-style arcade game while waiting for your train.

Willy Spiller/Hell On Wheels

In a way, Spiller’s riveting document of the way New York used to be happened by accident. He didn’t venture into the city’s subway system with the idea of making a book or even creating a photo essay. A freelance photographer, he was riding the train, sometimes with his Leica, sometimes with his Olympus, exploring the city, from Harlem to Coney Island, and he’d see something — “the start of a story, the start of a fairytale,” in his words — and want to hold on to it.

Willy Spiller/Hell On Wheels

“I never ever had the intention to take a lot of pictures down there,” he says. But after a year or two of casual shooting, he realized he had a perspective that New York photographers did not. “For the American photographer, all this was normal. For me, everything down there was completely crazy. It needed European eyes.”