Memories of an Empire: Volume I — The Subway Series is a four-year photographic study of New York City as it exists beneath itself.

Drawn from repeated journeys between upstate New York and the city via Metro-North, this volume documents the subway not as transit, but as territory—an underworld where ambition quiets, exhaustion surfaces, and millions of lives move in parallel without collision. These images are built on patience and observation rather than spectacle, resisting the exaggerated mythology of New York in favor of something truer and more intimate.

Here, the subway becomes the city’s nervous system: stations as characters, platforms as waiting rooms for thought, and train cars as temporary sanctuaries where silence speaks louder than conversation. Travelers, commuters, performers, the housed and unhoused pass through the same corridors, bound not by connection, but by proximity and momentum.

Even after leaving New York, the pull of its underworld remains. This book is not an attempt to explain the city, but to witness it—quietly, honestly, and between stops.

Memories of an Empire begins underground because that is where the empire reveals its bones.