Commuting to New York City by train is its own kind of ritual—an experience marked by early departures, hushed train cars, and the steady rhythm of steel on tracks. For many, including Templeton, it’s a liminal space between lives: home and work, solitude and crowd, sleep and wakefulness. The Metro-North line from Connecticut winds through suburbs and industrial corridors, pulling its passengers into the gravitational orbit of Manhattan. As the city draws closer, phones light up, coffees cool, and the silence breaks—but for a brief stretch of the journey, there’s a rare stillness. It’s in this transitional hush that Templeton found his subjects—not fully here, not yet there, simply suspended in the in-between.

Between 2015 and 2020, Jamie Templeton made over 7,000 photographs of sleeping train passengers during his daily commute from Connecticut to New York City. Armed with a small, mirrorless camera and a quiet sense of observation, Templeton began the project with a simple piece of advice: “Shoot what you can’t escape.” At the time, he wasn’t a photographer—just one more commuter among thousands, witnessing the same bleary-eyed faces day after day. But what began as a personal experiment quickly evolved into a quiet meditation on exhaustion, routine, and the strange intimacy of shared spaces. Each image captures a private world behind closed eyes—a collective portrait of a city in transit, asleep on its feet.

From the full archive, 100 images have been selected for this collection—offering a curated glimpse into a larger body of work.