CTA Tattler

"Beautiful People Take the Red Line"

Sometimes it pays off to randomly surf the Net. It did the other night as I watched football and cruised the cool chicagobloggers.com site.

First, that site is an index of bloggers organized by their proximity to stops on the Chicago Elevated train system. For instance, if you click on the El may for the Western stop on the Brown Line, you'll find links to 28 blogs by bloggers living/working around that stop. Kinda cool.

Surfing through that site I came across a photo blog with beautiful black-and-white pictures about "The Beautiful People [who] Take the Red Line."

Photographer Howard Blume -- self-anointed "paparazzi to the people" -- says this about his project:

"On any one Red Line car of the Chicago Transit Authority, you'll find Hoffman’s races of mankind, - breathing, shuffling mankind - packed together on their way to some place. Public transportation provides an intimate, privileged setting in which to appreciate people, where the passengers are temporarily stranded in a sitting or standing position.

"A random mix of passengers comes together as if they were deliberately posed in composition. Seconds later, the Red Line car comes to a stop, the doors open and the composition evaporates.

"I took these photographs on my way to and from work - in the morning getting on at Morse Avenue, a stop in Rogers Park, and getting off at Grand or Jackson, downtown Chicago.

"I began with my first roll of film on June 23, 1997 and shot the last on July 23, 1998. I’d take 3 to 6 seconds to frame and shoot and most often shot one to one."

Check out his work.

(Photo by Howard Blume)