Crossing Over

Thousands of rail tracks reach out across Russia like threads of a giant spider’s web. Even today, more than a hundred years after its construction, the Trans-Siberian Railway is at the core of Russia, for both transit and trade. Crossing Over is a photographic diary of Yanina Shevchenko’s trip across Russia on the Trans- Siberian Railway. The project introduces the train journey as a method for personal exploration of expansive landscape and offers a platform for rediscovery of what Russia is and what it represents. The image of Russia Shevchenko saw from the Trans-Siberian train is a network of interconnected yet dispersed populations. The human figures that appear in the photographs are signifiers that life is present in what seems to be a boundless and lonely territory. Space, or in this case, the landscape of the country, has no substantial essence in itself, but is ‘a context for human life’. The vast distances and the journey across them, unlimited open space and people full of life and faith: these form the most genuine portrait of the country’s national space.