Synonymous with the art of travel since 1854, Louis Vuitton continues to add titles to its Fashion Eye collection. Each book evokes a city, a region or a country, seen through the eyes of a fashion photographer.
The Orient Express is the most famous of all travel or luxury trains. Since its creation in 1883, its vagrancy has fueled passions and crimes and unites two continents. it lives today step by step, from memories to romances. With Orient-Express, a new work in the Fashion Eye collection, French photographer Sarah Moon moves away from the cities, countries and places invested by different works to offer a photographic novel over time.
Traveling by train marks a delicate, evasive experience of time. In contrast to walking, its steady pace, its rhythmic measure and its wanderings, the train journey shapes another form of vagrancy. Like walking, thought dissolves in it and flies away, but it is remembered neither by the path to follow nor by the need for an assured step. The thought hops from one moment to the next, concentrates and then forgets an often boring landscape, sometimes becoming subject to the imagination. No matter how fast it is, the train offers visions of the impossible reconciliation between proximity – embankments, quickly crossed stations, outdated cars – and the unreachable, this immutable landscape that slowly scrolls its film and its folklore. Those who travel by train face this dilemma. It does not cross a distance, it does not swallow it either, it does not travel more. Rather, it floats, between several planes, between several worlds, as a silent witness, running straight on the lonely rebound of the imaginary.
Each time, this impossible reconciliation gives advantage to the distance. Through the window, what is close, there at the round and smoking feet of the train, flies too fast to be quickly perceived. But above all, near and far combine in the same second, in a potential instant. The spirit bounces from one to the other, it “lets itself go to its reveries, to its thoughts, in the repetitive movement and throbbing of the axles”. Sarah Moon has grasped this peculiarity specific to speed travel. “The train itself is a timeless parenthesis, from one point to another,” she observed in an interview with Anne Maurel.
Her Orient-Express builds up a veritable novel image by image, where photographies and texts are constructed in scraps, imaginations and fragments. However, it is common to define photography as an art of the moment. This retracted, succinct, evasive definition of time nevertheless fits perfectly into Sarah Moon’s project. Its Orient Express interiors are as fleeting as the evanescent landscapes seen outside the train. What goes on inside has the same brief and powerful poetry as outside. The result is grainy and often blurred images, where the story disappears in vivid, black outlines. The speed gives the interior of the train a sentimental look. Cardamone armchairs seem fragile. The sleeping car breathes the scent of lost love. In the restaurant hang some ghosts. And then suddenly, fixed landscapes, a little agreed, as if an imagined story ended the next page. The artist embroiders a lonely journey, caught between immediate blur and the masterful, where the Orient Express becomes the train par excellence of a novel without columns, with multiple adventures.
This train travels all around fleeting and powerful stories. The Orient-Express naturally feeds a powerful imagination, but Sarah Moon charges it with its ghosts of elegance, of loving bonds, of loneliness as well. Departure and arrival disappear. The train is no longer a journey, but a material for romance. Cleverly, her shots and the text invent possible stories out of thin air. There is no common story, except the vagrancy of memories and the imagination of stories to deploy. All the strength of the images lies in their weakness; images as fragile as they are immutable, as fleeting as they are powerful. The stories just sketched.
“The slow and regular train ride, the changing lights of the landscapes, the passage of hours and seasons, the rumor of the distances crossed bring back fugitive images to the memory. The air around her is full of echoes, distant resemblances and fleeting stories. Coincidences ”.
Arthur Dayras
