New York Subway, 1960

Enrico Natali's first major body of work, made candidly on New York's subway trains and platforms in 1960, appears here in book form for the first time, some fifty years after he made it.

Natali photographed riders on the trains and waiting underground in black and white, working close and unnoticed among strangers. The series convinced him that photography, and America, would be his subject for the rest of his career. He went on to work in New Orleans, Chicago, and Detroit, producing the portrait series later published as "New American People." Nazraeli Press published this book in 2012, in association with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, to coincide with an exhibition there.

Natali was born in Utica, New York, and raised in Carthage, in the Adirondack foothills. He entered the United States Coast Guard Academy in 1951, where he first took up photography, then left in 1954 and moved to New York, working as an apprentice to the commercial photographer Anton Bruehl before turning the subway photographs into his first serious independent project.