Every 31 October, New York’s subway briefly becomes a corridor between ordinary working life and the city’s nocturnal theater. In Halloween Underground: New York Subway Portraits, Seymour Licht photographs costumed passengers traveling among commuters in everyday clothes: figures dressed as witches, monsters, literary characters, superheroes, and creatures of private invention. Trains, platforms, poles, and closing doors provide a stubbornly functional setting for these extravagant acts of self-transformation.

The book draws on twenty years of photographing Halloween underground. Licht’s method depends on moving through the system and recognizing fleeting conjunctions in which costume, gesture, setting, and circumstance align. A crowned Frog Prince gripping a subway pole or Iron Man holding apart train doors turns familiar infrastructure into an improvised stage. The humor of such scenes does not cancel their strangeness; the photographs continually negotiate the boundary between portrait, street observation, and spontaneous performance.

That sustained concentration gives the project significance beyond the spectacle of disguise. Halloween permits identities that would appear startling on another evening to pass through public space with unusual freedom. The subway functions both as transportation and as an unofficial backstage, carrying revelers toward parades or private gatherings while office workers make their way home. Across the sequence, fantasy remains embedded in the routines and physical constraints of the city, producing a compact study of anonymity, display, tolerance, and collective ritual.

Published by Seymour Licht Inc. in 2023, the 109-page hardcover gathers 79 photographs. For collectors, its interest lies in the disciplined unity of a long-term street-photography project: one recurring date, one civic system, and an ever-changing cast. The resulting book preserves not merely costumes but the temporary social permission surrounding them—the hours when New York’s most practical interior becomes a chamber for invention, before the trains and platforms return to ordinary use.