She traveled every New York City subway line — and photographed every first and last stop

The photobook “First Stop, Last Stop” showcases photographer Rita Nannini’s travels across some 665 miles of subway track across 26 routes and all five NYC boroughs.

It wasn’t until after photographer Rita Nannini left New York that she grew fascinated by the city’s subways. While living in Manhattan’s Upper West Side for some 15 years in the 1980s and early ’90s, Nannini only took short trips on the 1 train for short trips — and rarely, given the subway system’s bad reputation at the time. But after relocating to Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband in the ’90s, Nannini found that absence really did make the heart grow fonder — maybe even for pizza rat. (During visits back to New York to see friends and family in the years since her move, Nannini noted marked improvements in the subway’s facilities and ambience, she told CNN.) And having learned of the “End of the Line” challenge — an urban legend reportedly popular among groups of teens who would board trains at random and ride them until their final destination, just because — Nannini decided to, well, challenge herself, by visiting every first and last stop across the subway’s lines. Nannini’s take on the “End of the Line” experience saw her traveling some 665 miles of subway track across 26 routes and all five of the city’s boroughs. She took over 8,000 photos of the stations at each line’s ends, as well as the communities they served. In many cases, she rode the routes two or three times over to ensure she got ‘the shot.’ She described it, perhaps understatedly, as a “real labor of love.” (“People have asked me, ‘well, don’t you want to do the London Underground next?’” she told CNN in a Zoom interview, laughing. “No thank you, I’m done. I’m done.”) A selection of Nannini’s photos are now presented in her monograph “First Stop, Last Stop” — from the crisp modernity of the Oculus transit hub at the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan (the E train) to the Tudor-inspired architecture of Forest Hills in Queens (the R train); from a child’s baptism in the Atlantic waters off Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach (the B train) to a group of teens’ soccer game in the Williamsbridge Oval park in the Bronx (D train); and from crowds in Times Square to crowds in Grand Central Station, courtesy of the one-stop-long 42nd Street Shuttle train.