Six and a half feet wide. The scale of this panorama approaches the scale of the infrastructure itself—subway platforms that extend hundreds of feet, tunnels bored at massive diameters, underground civic architecture as ambitious as anything built above ground.

This is the companion to Masumi’s first LA Subway photograph, but larger, more monumental. Where the first work introduced the Red Line as urban possibility, this one confronts its sheer physical ambition. The city that destroyed its streetcar system and surrendered to the automobile was now boring through earthquake-prone earth to create a transit network that would have seemed impossible a generation earlier.

Underground spaces present particular challenges for photography. Limited sightlines. Artificial lighting. The way tunnels compress perspective and platforms seem to extend beyond what the eye can hold. Masumi’s photo collage technique addresses these constraints by assembling multiple views into a panorama that captures the spatial experience of being underground—not a single frozen moment, but the accumulated perception of moving through subterranean architecture.

The photograph is also a historical document. The Metro Rail has expanded substantially since 1991. New lines, new stations, ridership that would have seemed optimistic in the early years. Masumi captured the system at its moment of becoming—when it was still possible to photograph empty platforms, when the question of whether LA would embrace transit remained genuinely open.