Photographing the London Underground. An interview with Miss Underground.
28 of February of 2022
In this special #FerrovialBlog post, we asked Jess Angell – aka Miss Underground, an avid photographer of the London Underground and an influencer with more than 47.000 followers on Instagram, to give us some tips on how to photograph this iconic infrastructure and to tell us a bit more about herself and how she got into the art of photography. Below are her responses. Enjoy!
When and how did your passion for photography come about?
I fell in love with the underground when I was traveling on it everyday. I started to look at details of corridors and escalators and wanted to capture them all in an interesting way.
When and why did you start taking photos of the London Underground?
It was around early 2012 once Instagram really started to get big and I had completely fallen in love with sharing my life. Sharing pictures of the underground got me lots of followers from all over the world.
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Why the name “Miss Underground”? How did it come about?
My personal Instagram feed is @miss_jess as at the time I started on Instagram I was a nursery teaching assistant and called Miss Jess at school. It was a natural progression to start a second feed just for my underground images and @missunderground was born!
What’s your favorite underground station/s to shoot? Why?
I love Waterloo station as it is such a mismatch of tunnels and escalators from all the different underground lines that it connects. But it is always busy so sometimes it’s a challenge to get it empty!
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Do you use a mobile phone to take photos? If so, what type of phone and why? And if not, what other cameras to you shoot with?
I only use my mobile phone (iPhone) to shoot the underground tunnels and spaces as its always with me and sometimes I only have seconds to get my empty shot. I also edit my images on my phone with various apps that help with the different lighting in the underground.
What pushed you to write the book “Miss Underground”?
My friends had told me to do a book for years so I finally wanted to share my images with a new audience. My images are very different in print but I hope to do another book one day.
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For someone who is looking to take artistic photos of the London underground, what tips would you give them? (These could be anything from photography tips, certain spots to shoot, time of the day, certain stations, designs, etc. Feel free to expand on this point as much as you want)
Every station in the London Underground is different so if anyone wants to capture these spaces they should look for these differences and look at the details of handrails and lights.
How is it possible that most of your shots don’t show people (or only a few) knowing how packed the London Underground is most of the time? Does this have something to do with the time of day or do you talk to people, so they stay still while you take the shot?
I used to get up very early to capture spaces in the underground empty but these days when I’m traveling around London I usually just wait for empty spaces to appear in between trains!
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Do you have another underground in the world that you like to shoot? (e.g., NY Subway)
I have been lucky to shoot the New York Subway and Washington Metro but I also have have been to Berlin, Paris, Munich and Athens and taken pictures of their metros. I love Berlin’s U-bahn and Paris’ Metro is incredible (although a little smelly in parts!)
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