How to pass that time on that dreary journey to-and-from work? Read a book? Check your emails? Browse the Internet? People watch? Or maybe read a newspaper?

Photographer Matt Crabtree has been spending his travel time secretly taking pictures of his fellow commuters with his smart phone. He then retouches these images to make them look like figures from 16th century paintings—and the results are quite beautiful.

Crabtree is a self-taught photographer based in London who “looks for the quietly observed, minimal story.” Such stories can be found in his series of photographs 16th Century Tube Passengers. These photos take a moment out of time and make us see something we often take for granted.

More of Matt Crabtree‘s work can be seen here.
 

 

 
More of Matt Crabtree’s stunning subway portraits, after the jump…

 
In the summer of 1945, Stanley Kubrick, many years before he was the acclaimed director of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, had a series of photographs published in LOOK magazine, a competitor to LIFE. He was just 16 years old. Thus would begin a relationship with the magazine that would last several years, until he began making movies in earnest around the age of 23, in the early 1950s.
 

Kubrick took this self-portrait in 1949 with his Leica III while working as a staff photographer for LOOK Magazine
 
Kubrick was fond of street photography, somewhat like the recent discovery Vivian Maier, and in 1946 he did a series about the New York subway. For more on Kubrick’s photographic career, see the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Philippe D. Mather recent book Stanley Kubrick at LOOK Magazine: Authorship and Genre in Photojournalism and Film appears to be the only decent one out there on the subject.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
More of Kubrick’s stunning subway pics, after the jump…...

 
In 1983 and 1986, YouTube user RailroadPacific, a German tourist, visited a much grittier New York City and shot some amazing footage of the subway, Times Square, Chinatown, and the never to be seen again view of the city from atop the World Trade Center.

 
More videos after the jump…