A short stop

Photography

Trains and train stations – new destinations and adventure, farewells and separations, sometimes ominous signals of tragic fates, like that of Anna Karenina. From glorious Central Stations with imposing gallery halls to ultra modern multi-level concrete mazes dispatching fast trains of Japan and China…Rural Japan train stations, small and old – tired farmers, kids coming back from school, mature and independent, old women bent under weights of years and baskets offering help to unexpected Westerners roaming the countryside on their own…never failing exactness of trains arriving and departing… Moscow metro stations remain one of the most impressionable experiences of my youth – each a glorified artistic story, from mosaics to sculptures…and people passing through, engulfed in their books (no electronic devices at that time) and everyday worries, not noticing…

And then, there are these numeorous undescript train stops on the way to the destination…often empty, with a rare passanger…awkward, almost haunted, train stations for a short stop.., if any. Sometimes in decay as if passing trains accelerate passing of time…

Traveling by train in a Canadian winter landscape is experience of an utter loneliness – gray and white, an occasional blurred red silo streak in a window frame…the world caving under the snow… the traveling soul turning inside…yet, the unexpected yearning for this feeling, almost as self-indulgence…Train stations in vastness of empty space, where a short stop is an event and a link with the world…

This is Natasha’s story that triggered mine…