What Lies Beneath: Epic Scenes From NYC’s Magnificent Underground Tunnels

Though you almost certainly haven’t heard his name, there’s a good chance you’ve seen some of Patrick Cashin’s photography. He’s one of Flickr’s most reliably awesome contributors, and his most popular shots have traveled widely across the web, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. You could argue that his subject matter is limited–he mostly shoots dark, dirty scenes of New York City–but no one else is really doing anything like it. Why? Because while most photographers jostle to document life on street level, Cashin alone gets to capture everything going on beneath the surface.

Cashin is the staff photographer for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It’s a job that requires him to document all things MTA, from staid ribbon-cutting ceremonies and small-time grip-and-grins to the mammoth subterranean construction projects that have made MTA’s Flickr account a destination itself. If you’ve ever read about yet another delay in the Second Avenue Subway and exasperatedly asked yourself, what are they doing down there, anyway?, Cashin’s photographs offer a succinct riposte: They’re digging magnificent, impossibly big holes in the Earth.

Cashin came on board at the MTA over a decade ago, working for years as a contract photographer until they brought him on full-time in 2010. His early work didn’t have an especially wide audience; Cashin’s pictures initially wound up in annual reports, brochures, and other in-house materials. Only recently, after a new press team brought the MTA into the social media era and started putting Cashin’s work on Flickr, did the shots become some of the city’s most captivating viral fodder.

A close-up of the tracks at an extension of the No. 7 line. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin

Even at the remove of the internet, Cashin’s underground photos are viscerally gripping. His various collections–a few dozen in all–cover all phases of the largely invisible process of subway-making, from the birth of new lines to the maintenance of ones nearly a century old. The younger efforts are particularly striking–here, future subway stations take the form of massive caverns of dirt, still years off from being ready for platforms and tracks. Unsurprisingly, the sites are just as astonishing in person. “The first couple of times you’re down there, you’re just kind of awed by it,” Cashin says. “The sand hogs are buzzing around you, and you just don’t want to get in these guys’ way, because you feel like they’re going to just walk right over you and keep on going.”

Cashin travels light, gear-wise. His go-to kit is a Nikon D4 with two lenses: a 17-35mm and a 28-70mm. He mostly shoots handheld, he says, and nine times out of 10, he uses available light. “I’ve got no problem cranking up the ISO,” he explains. “I’m in a dark dirty place, so what’s a little noise? It just adds to the feeling of the image, as far as I’m concerned.”

Two construction workers surveying the progress in the East Side Access project earlier this year. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin

The photos offer an unusually well-lit look into the typically obscured infrastructure, leading some commenters to assume that he uses some sort of high-dynamic range technique where over- and underexposed shots are combined to create hyperreal scenes of crisp detail. But Cashin, a long-time photographer who worked for years at Newsweek’s photo lab before joining the MTA, says that’s not the case. “I didn’t even know what HDR was–I had to look it up on the internet,” he says. “It’s a bit gimmicky…The only thing I use Photoshop for is what you’d use in a darkroom–I burn, I dodge, I sharpen, and I crop.”

Granted, it can be a little bit dumbfounding, the first time you see one of Cashin’s shots. You try to reconcile what you’re looking at–a cavern fit for an Indiana Jones set piece–with the bustling city you know stands on top of it, but it’s often hard to believe that this is what it looks like down there, underneath that Jamba Juice.

At this point, for Cashin, some of that initial wonder has worn off. Now, his favorite part of the job is tracking the progress of the sites he’s been visiting routinely, year after year.

“Sometimes it’s changed so much you just kind of scratch your head and say, ‘am I sure I was here before?!’” he explains. The morning we talked, he’d just shot some new photographs of an extension to the No. 7 line. He spoke of the work like a proud father. “God, I remember when this was just one dirt hole,” he says of the site, reviewing the day’s work. “Now it’s a complete station and the tracks are almost connected to Times Square.”