A Dislodged Portal

You could almost believe it leads somewhere else.

This underpass, lit by flickering overhead fluorescents, scrawled with fading graffiti and ghosts of giant figures, feels like more than just a tunnel beneath a road. The perspective pulls you in—too straight, too narrow, too symmetrical. It’s like a set from a film, a visual trick, or the first frame of a story that never quite explains itself.

I waited until someone walked through. One silhouette, small against the scale of concrete and steel. And in that moment, something shifted. The far end of the corridor—dim and red-lit, where bike lights blink behind glass—looked like a portal. A threshold. The kind of place that might not be part of this world at all.

But of course, it is. It’s just an alley. Wet pavement, stained walls, cracked fixtures. A space no one photographs unless they’re chasing texture, or chasing ghosts.

That’s what street photography does at its best—it lets you believe in fiction for a second. It reframes the banal. You’re not looking at a passage under a train line. You’re looking at a rift in the everyday, a line between here and somewhere else.

And when the frame is empty again, when the footsteps fade and the lights buzz above, it all goes back to what it is.

Just another place people pass through without stopping.