There's the urban legend that when you use the handrails on the subway, you're effectively shaking hands with 100 people at the same time. I wanted to see if there was any way to kind of capture that. My name's Craig Ward. I'm a typographer and designer based here in Brooklyn.

I wasn't really sure what I was going to see, so I was really surprised by the diversity of the colors and the shapes. It felt like I needed to juxtapose the grossness of it and sort of present it in quite a premium way. I definitely wanted to tie it back to the subway lines themselves, so I used the colored gels. They looked like little worlds. I think that's what I really like about them.

People began to ask me what I'd actually captured. We could probably safely identify around a dozen or so different kinds of bacteria. Anything else would probably have needed to be isolated and sent to a lab and tested properly. I think probably twothirds of what we found were what's deemed natural flora, which is present on everybody's hands. We did find some creepier stuff, salmonella in small quantities, E. coli, staph, strep. The Weill Cornell PathoMap project that was next level. They basically swabbed every subway station around the city, over 400 stations, and profiled something like 15,000 species of bacteria, almost half of which had never been seen before or never been identified before, which is obviously super creepy. Alongside the creepy stuff, I think it's great that they were able to isolate bacteria associated with mozzarella and the sauerkraut. I think New York's such a foodie city. I think it's perfect that that's what you find on the subway as well.

I think the images are portraits, albeit very unconventional ones and certainly not in the traditional sense. They're very much a snapshot of the people of New York and commuters. The subway, as rife as it is with bacteria, isn't a hospitable environment for the bacteria. So if I hadn't captured it on that particular day, it would've been dead within hours or a day or so at most. I think there's an element of truth to the myth about the shaking hands with 100 people. You feel very small here, but just be happy about the fact there's a lot of smaller individuals just sort of struggling with New York on your train as well as you.



Credits:
Director/Editor
Emily Driscoll

Filmed by
Jeff Nash

Music
Audio Network

Photography
Craig Ward
Tasha Sturm
The Mason Lab
The Wall Street Journal and Martin Burch, Chris Canipe, Madeline Farbman, Rachel Feierman and Robert Lee Hotz

Special Thanks
Christopher Mason
Craig Ward
Luke Groskin
Weill Cornell Medicine