Ex-prof at prestigious NYC art school takes creepy photos of straphangers including kids and tank-top-wearing women
An artist and former prof at the city’s prestigious School of Visual Arts is stockpiling a “creepy” collection of photos of unwitting straphangers — including scores of tank-top-wearing women.Brian Appel — who claims to be “Faculty Emeritus” at SVA, which the Manhattan school denies — has been uploading tens of thousands of images to his Facebook account for more than two years.The trove includes photos of rail-riding couples kidding, friends laughing and straphangers dapperly dressed as they get to their destinations.Some of the pics include children.A slew also capture unsuspecting women wearing tight and revealing clothes.“It’s very creepy! It’s very scary for women,” Brooklyn mom Courtney Fitzpatrick told The Post.“I was really mad when I saw it,” she said of the collection.
“Both of my daughters were on it a year apart from each other.In fact, one was his cover photo — it was a picture of my daughter when she was 16 going to play practice with her friend, who was 14.”It is not illegal to take pictures of strangers in public spaces, such as the subway, without consent.
The faces in Appel’s snaps are not blurred.Fitzpatrick said she learned about the collection earlier this week when someone alerted a Bay Ridge Facebook group that Appel took most of his pictures on the R train — and posted them online with location and date stamps.Fitzpatrick said she had a gut feeling she would find her two girls, ages 25 and 18, in Appel’s images and spent hours scouring the collection until she discovered them in separate posts from January 2026 and July 2025, respectively.One of the daughters was photographed crying on the subway after a bad day, while the other was clearly a minor, the mom noted.To make matters worse, one of her girls had already experienced a stalker, and Fitzpatrick feared that the picture could reignite the very real concern for her daughter’s safety.“I was really mad when I saw her,” Fitzpatrick, 51, said o...