The idea for this imaginary album cover series came to me when I tried pairing my subway photographs with jazz melodies. All pictures were taken between 2001 and 2017 in the metro systems of Lille, Paris, London, Moscow, Kyiv, Tokyo, and New York — cities I either lived in or visited often.

Most track titles were borrowed from albums that have been part of my life since the ’90s. Others I invented. The core inspiration comes from Blue Note Records — its vibrant, high-contrast covers shaped the identity of this project.

My love for jazz began in my parents’ living room, with a battered Dixieland record by the Firehouse Five. Later, I started building my own collection — first from a FNAC shop on Rue de Rennes. That’s how I discovered Blue Note.

The label’s albums were complete artworks to me — where the music, photography, and typography were deeply connected. I learned that most of the photos were shot by Francis Wolff, a close friend of Blue Note’s founder Alfred Lion, who fled to New York to escape Nazism.

I toned the images in sepia, red, and brown using chemical baths in my darkroom. Blue and green hues were added digitally when scanning Kodak Tri-X negatives. In these frames, major and minor keys coexist — somewhere between dream and reality.

A blue note is a tone played half a step lower than usual — a musical dissonance charged with emotion. Like these tones, my photos are muted, shadowed, underground. They echo the melancholy and expressiveness inherited from African pentatonic roots fused with Western harmony.

The series closes with a quote from Arthur Rimbaud’s sonnet “Vowels”:
“A — black, E — white, I — red, U — green, O — blue…”
The vowel “O”, linked to the color blue, feels like a subway wheel turning in the dark