Flashes’ Forgotten Powersuits

When I pressed the shutter, I wasn’t chasing irony. It emerged later, in the edit, when I realised this looked less like a street photo and more like a comic panel stripped of its ink—The Flash and Kid Flash mid-sprint, anonymous in civvies, caught in a blur between timelines, rushing to fix a multiverse misstep but forgetting the suits that gave them identity.

The angle was deliberate. I tilted the frame to exaggerate imbalance, to underline the diagonal force of movement surging left to right. The grand stairway of Milano Centrale—the actual location—becomes a stage. Lines, shadows, steps: they all stretch and funnel speed. The architecture is static but theatrically involved, giving context and contrast to the rush.

Shutter speed: slow enough to allow motion trails, fast enough to preserve some limb definition. I didn’t want a pure ghost effect. I needed the gesture of running, the weight of feet pushing off the ground. This isn’t chaos; it’s disciplined blur.

I handheld it, but braced against the banister. The exposure leaned slightly under—intentional—to emphasise tone depth in the marble and shadows. White shirts and light reflections on the stone walls serve as anchors, pulling visual weight back from the edges. That light wraps the figures with a sheen—like residual kinetic energy. The colour palette is muted: greys, creams, and a splash of denim blue. It lets movement take precedence over chromatic distraction.

This is, in essence, a photograph about velocity and anonymity. Even superheroes can become invisible in the grind of the everyday. Or perhaps we’re all running so fast, we’ve forgotten to put on our own suits.