Untitled (Men on subway)

Tosh Matsumoto photographed evening commuters, in part, out of practicality. As a professional printer, he spent his days in darkrooms, leaving little daylight to make his own pictures. With its individual rectangular windows, this off-kilter photograph of men in a subway car resembles a contact sheet or film strip.

Matsumoto was self-taught. Using a basic camera and a copy of How to Make Good Pictures, an instructional guide produced by the company Eastman Kodak, he learned photography while imprisoned during World War II at the Amache internment camp, a concentration camp for Japanese Americans located in Colorado.