June 2, 2023, was unusually hot for a late spring day. Temperatures hit a high of nearly 90 degrees early that afternoon. It was even hotter underground, within the subway stations where Sirui Ma spent nearly that entire Friday.
Ma, a Beijing-born professional photographer living in London, had finally gathered the courage to shoot the project that had long gestated in her imagination. With her medium format Mamiya RZ67 SLR and a borrowed flash, she set up at the Utica Avenue station, in the middle of the platform, the better to capture the faces and gestures of the dozens of subway conductors that would come through the Bed-Stuy stop that morning.
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