- Dream Train
«A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away.
And I asked in the dream:
Did you come by photograph or by train?
All photographs are a form of transportation
and an expression of absence».
– John Berger –Portland, MA. Agosto 2017
Trains are always objects of rare magnetism, because even today, more than any other transport system, they evoke the journey and awaken the impulse to leave for new destinations.
Climbing up on the footboards and peering through the windows, the journey on this train, well composed from head to tail, begins: from the motor coach to the last carriage; passing through all the classes; through the vestiges of the restaurant coach, jumping the joint between two carriages, coming to watch the landscape disappear from the rear window.
An imaginary journey towards a more distant destination: the dream.
Nowadays no one could ever say that he traveled by such an ancient train; yet, almost everyone could say to have imagined or dreamed of being on board an old train that crosses the landscape, to sit on wooden benches or leather seats, to hear the creaking of luggage on the overhead hat, to peek in first class or in the restaurant carriage, to watch the world flow out.
An ancient world: English countryside, French villages, Italian mountains, American far west, Russian steppe … All photographs framed in the rectangle of the windows and taken with the eyes of unconscious traveling photographers. Only black and white photographs; because the remote past, even dreamed, can not have colors, but only an ethereal vignetting placed on the border between colorful reality and monochromatic imagination.
Did you come by photograph or by train?
Giuseppe Di Giulio | Photo 