VOST
Extract from Eugenie Shinkles’essay acompanying the artist book "From A to B" (Anthony Prévost, 2019):
“[...] After a year spent travelling in Asia, Prévost made his return journey to Europe via the Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Siberian railways – a journey of more than 7500 km over twenty days. He spent most of it lying on a bunk in a third-class carriage, looking out of the window, as the train made its way slowly through China, Mongolia, Siberia and Russia. From A to B is a reflection on this trip – on changing landscapes, on enormous skies and small details, on people and unspectacular scenes and daily lives that Prévost would only ever know in passing.
Air travel has encouraged us to regard a long journey as a kind of interregnum – a void suspended between two points. In the air, space lacks substance, distance collapses into the time it takes to eat a meal and watch a couple of movies. On the ground, however, changes in the landscape unfold slowly. Weather passes by, places appear and disappear, day fades slowly into night and back again. Border crossings aren’t abstract transformations in airspace, but long ordeals – often taking hours as passports are checked, luggage searched, and train wheels changed to conform to variations in the size of railway lines between one country and another.
The terrain varies dramatically over the route – endless stands of birch and conifer, low mountains, cities, farmland and open steppe. The emotional landscape is more temperate, the boredom of confinement marked out by the calming routine of third-class travel – daydreaming, drinking coffee, buying food from vendors on the platforms during the infrequent stops, washing in the single basin shared by all of the passengers in the carriage.”
Eugénie Shinkle is a photographer, writer, and Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster. She writes for various publications such as Foam, Aperture, Fashion Theory, American Suburb X, and The Journal of Architecture.