Some people have strange interests. I watched a doco once about a guy who loved collecting his belly-button lint and putting it in a jar - colour coding it of course. He had a row of big glass jars on his mantle piece with an assortment of colours of lint. Not my kind of past-time but I guess watching that doco did make me feel a little more normal about my hobbies!

One of my strange interest seems to be photographing places such as the London Underground on a sunday afternoon when nobody is there; just the tiles, the lights, the stairs and the noise of the tube rumbling in the background somewhere. I stood at these places for hours and hours. You would be surprised how long you have to wait, before there is actually nobody standing in the busy stairways and escalators of London's Tube. The last person would round the bend and I would start snapping away. Normally they'd look behind them, who knows what they're thinking - probably mentally noting how strange some people's interests are.

Photographs from Subterrania - London Underground

These are shots from my Subterrania project so far - from London/UK.

Help me take this project to the next level - I want to photograph the rest of the world's metro underground station tunnels, walkways and escalators in the same vain of how I photographed London's Underground. At the end will be an exhibition, book, prints.

This is something I've been wanting to do for many years, and I believe the end result will be something amazing. The work will cross many cultures and countries, architectural styles and era's from the early 1920's through the former Soviet iron curtain rule up to modern Europe with its shiny new automated stations at places like Copenhagen and Stockholm.

WHO IS KRIS BAUM?

I absolutely love photography. I live and breathe it. I photograph almost anything and I turned my passion into my career around 8 years ago when I realised its all I wanted to do. I havent looked back since. What I love the most is photographing my own projects. This project has been one of my passions for many years. Its only till recent (with new cameras that can shoot hi ISO!) that its even possible to produce this work! I cant wait to get out there and finish Subterrania.


HOW AM I GOING TO DO THIS?

Ive done my research on which cities to infiltrate and get my camera down into their dindgy metro dens. Here's an incomplete one that roughly maps out my course to get all the distinct styles and forms of Metro's around the globe;

Singapore, Tokyo, Moscow, St Petersberg, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Munich, Berlin, Prague, Kiev & Kharkov (Ukraine), Milan, Paris, Bilbao & Barcelona & Valencia (Spain) .

Each subway system will need a fair amount of time,  around 3 days in total of underground time; this is based on how long it took to photograph London's underground. That makes a fairly long time standing in metro stations!

As I go, I'll post some actual shots from the Metro stations and other interesting shots along the way kind of documenting my journey on my blog:  subterrania.wordpress.com

Once I have completed the project (which will take roughly 40 days), I will come back to Australia exhausted but enlightened, and start preparing for an exhibition of the best prints from the series which will happen in Spring 2012. I'll be printing the shots in large format which should look amazing. I am in the process of working out which gallery is best for this - as the prints will be quite large and there will be 20-30 of them.

Project cost estimates:

$3000 air/rail travel
$4000 accommodation
$2000 food misc..

As you can see, its well above the $6.5k - the rest I will be putting in myself.

Then there is the cost of the exhibition, printing and book. These are in the order of $10k.