You get back from the trip. You develop the film. You look at the photos.

Everything you saw out there is right in front of you, sharp and clear. So you make a zine. And while you're making it, you're sure of it, people are going to love this.

Then you release it, and almost nothing happens.
The boxes are still in your room.

Some of you reading this know exactly what I'm talking about.

FED. has just started carrying Silent Land, a self-published photobook by my friend Katsumi. He shot it in Russia in 2019, travelling from Moscow to Irkutsk, photographing the people and the places he found along the way.

The first time I saw it, I thought: this is what travel photography is supposed to be.

So here's what this book made me think about.

See Silent Land →

Times Square in New York. Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo. The Eiffel Tower in Paris. Every city has the places a visitor is supposed to see.

Photographs of those places already exist by the million, and when you research a trip you see them. Of course you want to make one too. I did the same thing. I took a lot of photos in Times Square the first time I went to New York.

But a photograph made in a famous place has already been made by thousands of other people. It can feel like a good shot when you're the one standing there. To everyone else, it's a photo they've seen before.

Silent Land has almost none of that. What's in it is the mother and child who shared his compartment on the Trans-Siberian. The home of a Tibetan Buddhist man he met along the way. People he ran into on the street.
Nearly all of it happened inside his own personal space.

That's the first thing that makes this book what it is.
Katsumi never stands outside the scene and records it. He isn't photographing what he saw. He's photographing what he went through.

It's a book of photographs from Russia that isn't a book about Russia.

When you're going somewhere you don't know, in a language you don't speak, most people plan it out. This day, this place, this thing.

Katsumi travels nothing like that. He spent five days on the Trans-Siberian and met a lot of people on that train. One of them was a Tibetan Buddhist man.

The man took an interest in him and invited him home. Katsumi didn't say he had somewhere to be. He went. He ate with them. He was introduced to their friends, and then the friends took him somewhere else again. He let the whole thing happen.

One of them asked him if he wanted to go shoot rifles. Katsumi had never fired one. He kept his eye on the scope when he pulled the trigger, the recoil drove the rifle straight back into his face, and it hurt.

None of that happens on a trip with a full schedule. And that kind of accident is exactly what makes a travel photograph yours.

Katsumi says he isn't thinking about anything when he shoots. If something looks good, he shoots it. What anyone around him thinks isn't part of it.

You step off the train and the whole world is under snow and it stops you.
Right then, don't think if I photograph this I'll look like a tourist from the countryside. You don't need that thought. You liked it. Shoot it.

Escalators. Most people don't take photos on an escalator. Katsumi shoots constantly on them. This one he made after speaking to the woman standing in front of him.

You're in a foreign country. Things are going to move you all day long. Photograph all of it.

If it's a person, ask. Don't hesitate.
If candid is the right way, shoot candid, immediately.

Once you start missing the shots you wanted, you stop being able to react at all. It's like driving. You don't start out at full speed.
You keep shooting until you can respond the moment something lands. On a trip, where the window is short, that matters more than anywhere else.

Every time I go back to it, I come away wanting to stop making the standard travel photographs. To spend more time with the people who actually live there. To photograph what I went through instead of what I walked past.

Silent Land is a hardcover book, beautifully made. Every copy is numbered and signed by Katsumi. There's no reprint planned and there aren't many. Get yours while they're here.

Grab your copy →

Katsumi talks about the trip and the darkroom work in our interview.
Watch on YouTube →

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