14,000 underground felonies — a far cry from today’s approximate 2,000.

But to a then 22-year-old Florida photographer named Christopher Morris, who was interning at New York photo agency Black Star, and who was eager to make his mark like photographers he admired working in Beirut and El Salvador, this graffiti battleground proved an opportunity to work on something of a domestic front line.

Christopher Morris

Today a TIME contract photographer and an award winning photojournalist, Morris recently re-discovered these previously unpublished shots when he read an interview with famous graffiti artist Tracy 168, who he had photographed in the 1980s. Now, looking back through his archive, Morris remembers that time as being pretty unique: “I was actually out looking for criminal elements,” he says on the phone, “trying to provemyself as a photojournalist, and prove myself to myself.”

Over a six-month period in 1981, Morris embedded himself in the world below, sometimes riding the trains alone, other times riding with the Guardian Angels volunteer anti-crime group. He’d hang out with groups of teens riding trains at night, and show up in the early morning to catch work-bound commuters.

Using ektachrome film and a magenta filter to offset the florescent lights, Morris found interesting subjects in the relatively safe commuting space of midtown Manhattan, further north in the Bronx, and the eastern wilds of Brooklyn. He also happened to be working at approximately the same time as Bruce Davidson, a photographer who memorably chronicled 1980s subway life, and whom he admired greatly.

The images that emerged from his months-long project show