I’m really not a train guy. Despite all the images on this blog suggesting otherwise, I couldn’t tell you the first detail about locomotives or gauges, routes or liveries.
But in the gleaming – or dilapidated – vehicles, the frenetic stations and the detritus, I see stories. Of adventure. Of tragedy. Beginnings and endings. Speed and stasis. The machines that deliver us to the moments: the defining experiences of travel…
A late night train near the Eiffel Tower, from my brief visit to Paris in December.
A quick shot going up an escalator, somewhere in the north part of the Paris Metro system.
Heading back into the subway after an early morning shoot. This shot was taken just shortly after my wet plate-style shot of Pont Neuf.
A vintage feel.
An escalator in the massive Châtelet station in the Paris Metro. In the center of the city, the station was just over 100 years old when I took this shot back in 2001. No need for digital film grain and dust filters on this shot — actual film grain and dust comes from the Ilford HP5 I used at the time, and the Nikon scanner to make the digital image. I miss the darkroom days.
The Cité station, in the center of Paris, isn’t the last stop on the Metro’s Line 4. But after one year of daily photo posts, this shot is the end of the line for my yearlong project. 365 posts ago, I set out to try something different.
Found in my old film archives, shot in La Motte-Picquet – Grenelle Metro station in 2001.
A view from one station platform to another, somewhere along Line 4.
Midday in January, an empty station.
Originally dating from 1904, the Arts et Métiers (Arts and Crafts) station was redesigned to look like something out of a Jules Verne novel.
“Keep right” when moving through the tube of moving sidewalks at the massive Châtelet Metro station in Paris.
The Cité Metro station and its entrance up to Place Louis Lépine, in the center of Paris.
Three levels of the Hôtel de Ville Metro station, one of the original eight stations in the city’s system when the first section was first opened in 1900.