Los Angeles had a subway once. The Pacific Electric Railway’s Red Cars crisscrossed the city until the 1950s, when automobile interests and freeway expansion dismantled the system. For decades afterward, LA became synonymous with car dependence—the freeway city, the smog city, the place where public transit was a joke.

Then they started digging.

The Metro Rail Red Line, which would open in 1993, represented nothing less than a revolution in how Los Angeles understood itself. Boring tunnels through seismically active ground. Constructing underground stations beneath a city culturally defined by horizontal sprawl. Creating public infrastructure in a place where the car had seemed to win every argument for half a century.

Masumi documented the subway during construction—stations newly completed, platforms gleaming and mostly empty, infrastructure representing a possible future not yet integrated into the city’s daily life. The spaces feel both futuristic and uncertain. Would Angelenos actually use this? Would a subway work in a city built on the assumption that everyone drives?

Her photo collage technique suits underground architecture: the fragmented images mimicking the disorientation of subterranean space, the way platforms and tunnels create linear sequences that conventional photography struggles to capture. The work documents a moment of possibility—the city committing to a different idea of itself, the outcome still unknown.