THE QUIET REPORT

The first photograph is crowded almost to its edges. Arms reach for the overhead straps; a man in a white shirt looks directly towards my camera while the passengers around him seem occupied by their own thoughts. I made the picture with a wide lens, but there is hardly any room left in the frame. That is how the carriage felt.

Seoul’s subway began with a single section between Seoul Station and Cheongnyangni, opened on 15 August 1974. It has since grown into a network that carries people across the city and far beyond it.  In 2025, Lines 1–8 carried an average of about 6.69 million passengers a day.

Numbers like that are easier to understand from inside a train. Each person in my photograph has somewhere to be; for a few stops, they must negotiate the same small space. Then the doors open and the arrangement disappears.

At Sinsa station, I followed the flow down an escalator. People were going in both directions beneath tiled walls and fluorescent lights. A warning sign above them said, simply, “Don’t run.” Later, on the platform, I photographed a woman walking past a row of empty seats. The station had room to breathe for a moment. Even the stairs were briefly empty.

These are the intervals I like in Seoul’s metro: the full carriage and the vacant platform, the rush to change trains and the seconds when nobody is on the staircase. Above ground, I walk in search of the older, everyday city. Underground, it travels past me.

Seoul, 24.09.26, Leica M11 Monochrom