From Cluj-Napoca to Brasov
Paradox: the train would be an ideal mode of transport for travel photography because, unlike the car or two wheels, you cannot get off. This constraint makes us both melancholy (all these views that pass under our noses without having had time to photograph them) and extremely attentive, the eye more than ever on the lookout to anticipate the image to be extracted from the stream passing before our eyes. A bit like street photography, which requires the same vigilance not to miss a face before it disappears in the flow of passers-by. In this series made on board an old Romanian train, I exploited this constraint by choosing to compose my images from the standard frame of the corridor window almost identical to the classic 24X36 photographic format. Afterwards, this shooting device proved to be productive: the images thus constructed with the integrated window frame are reminiscent of enlarged contact sheet images. That this series taken with my laptop can evoke something of the imagination and the poetry of the silver image pleases me enough. These images were born from a 300 km trip that took me in six hours from Cluj-Napoca to Braşov, Romania.
Bernard Chevalier
