24 Hours Underground

24 Hours Underground is a street photography project about spending 24 consecutive hours underground to document life on the Philadelphia subway system. On weekends the SEPTA, the Philadelphia Subway System, operates a 24-hour service on select lines. It is one of the only cities in the US (and, indeed, the world) to do so. As the trains make unbroken laps through the urban subspace, a temporary subculture emerges. It is an anonymous banquet of momentary intimacies: A homeless man holding the door for a late commuter. Lovers kissing and quarrelling in urine-stained stairwells. Buskers serenading listless shift workers. Strangers squeezing wordlessly together on trains and then separating as silently as they had arrived. A jackhammer operator playing peek-a-boo with a passing child; flashes of the individual among the nameless. As the night wears to morning, the trains empty and the interconnected stations become a sprawling and exhausted public housing project. By the time the residents fall asleep on the dirty station floors, the police arrive to prod them awake. The morning commuters arrive and the cycle begins again. 24 Hours Underground is a street documentary project shot entirely within one day in February on the Philadelphia subway system. It is an exploration of transitional space as a destination itself and a quest for flashes of the individual among the nameless. It is a record of a short but candid descent by two photographers into an underworld and an attempt to expose of the duality of this subculture: ephemeral and permanent, ugly and beautiful, human and alien.