A hand extends from an open train window holding a cigarette. The tip glows among a blue gray landscape. Beyond the hand the figure is absent, and in its place is a gesture caught among the colliding motion of land and machine, of a world passing with a body briefly inside of it. The smoker finding a moment of stillness in a kinetic world. It is a photo that feels like a glimpse into a reality being lived instead of one being made.
The photograph of the “smoker on the train” is from Europass by Victor Sira, a book of images made between 2001 and 2006 by a young Venezuelan artist traveling through Europe on a budget Eurail pass. For Sira, this was a quintessential voyage of youth, waking in unfamiliar cities, the train “a moving frame for Europe’s unwritten stories.” Travel and photography have always found each other, but one of the things that makes Europass compelling is the train. The train is a kind of space that is between departure and arrival and when it was originally introduced it annihilated the perception of space and time, according to philosopher Wolfgang Schivelbusch. It made the world smaller and larger simultaneously. Tracks built over physical terrain allowed people to access more of it at increased speeds while reducing any distance which was limited to horse or foot before. This made the world, on one hand, smaller. At the same time it also made the world larger as there was more space to traverse with this new perceptual openness, reminding people of the limits of their abilities to see all of it.
While making the photos in Europass, Sira was a young artist traveling through a continent that was not his own. The Eurail pass itself was a postwar European project built on the idea of open borders and continental unity. Sira entered from the outside, moving through foreign landscape. The photographs he made, like the smoker, inhabit the space between experience and reflection, embodying the idea of transit. Made before he knew what they were, before there was an audience, before the iPhone and social media.
Like the train, social media opened new possibilities for immediate purpose, circulation, and transmission. Nathan Jurgenson writes in The Social Photo that the social image finds its purpose not in the object itself but in the sharing of the moment as it presents itself. In that world, being aware of the moment as a moment opens the possibility of failing at it. The more images are made and shared as social currency, the harder it becomes to exist for the sake of existing. The hand holding the cigarette in Sira’s photograph is not performing for anyone. It was made at a time when the image had not yet been pulled into the service of transmission, when just being somewhere with a camera was still enough.
Twenty years pass. Sira returns to the photographs as a different person with a fully developed practice and years of experiences, but the young artist and the established artist are still both inside the same photographs. That temporal gap is its own kind of train journey. The photographs traveled through twenty years of Sira’s life before arriving at their destination. What they show is not just Europe in 2001 to 2006. They show what it looked like to be that age, in that place, before the world became what it is now. The book is an act of remembering and of finally arriving somewhere the images were always heading.
The hand out the window speeds through foreign landscapes as much as the image itself passes through time and the changing world. For Sira, it carries the passing self, a young artist who did not yet know where the train was taking him, and the established one who looked back and saw how far it had gone.
“smoker on the train” is from Europass by Victor Sira. Published by Bookdummypress in 2025.
Link to Victor Sira’s website:
https://victorsira.com/
Link to the book:
https://bookdummypress.com/store/p/europass-by-victor-sira
A Week With is a weekly writing series focused on a single image from my art and photobook library. I spend seven days returning to the image and write about what it brings into focus about culture and the present moment.