EASTWARD, UNTIL THE WORLD CHANGES ALPHABET

Eight stops, enough to see, not enough to tame: St Petersburg (3 nights), Moscow (2 nights), Yekaterinburg (2 nights), Krasnoyarsk (2 nights), Irkutsk + Olkhon (5 nights), Ulan-Ude (2 nights), Ulaanbaatar + the Steppe (6 nights), Beijing (4 nights). The remaining nights belong to the train: the corridor becomes road, studio, and darkroom of the mind.

Five landscapes, five rules. Water (St Petersburg): reflections, rain, surfaces; expose for the highlights. Iron (Urals): lines, masses, ideology; seek their friction with the everyday. Scale (Siberia): compress with an 85 mm lens; let distance become the subject. Emptiness (Mongolia): fewer images, more waiting; the horizon need not always sit in the centre. Density (Beijing): build layers; one clear gesture within the chaos.

The workshop advances by subtraction. Week 1: Seeing — exposure, previsualisation, walking rhythm, notebook, short sequence. Week 2: Constructing — geometry, planes, figure–ground relationships, colour as structure. Week 3: Encountering — consensual portraiture, listening, captions, giving back. Week 4: Sequencing — editing, diptych, rhythm, text, project coherence. Every evening: 20 minutes of contact sheets, 20 of selection, 20 of words.

The sleeping compartment is a school of attention. Window: the equivalent of 36 exposures; one horizon height only. Corridor: tell time through five details, without photographing the landscape. Stations: one image per stop; work only during the permitted minutes. Compartment: a still life of fellow travellers; ask, show, write down the name. Night: 1/15 sec, high ISO; photograph movement, not digital noise.

Photograph, name, lose, rediscover. Dawn: 90 min in the field, no reviewing on the display for the first 30 min. Midday: A/B backup, notes on names, places, and consent. Sunset: second outing, variation not repetition. Evening: contact sheet from 60 to 12 to 3 images; one sentence for each. Every 4 days: group critique — intention / form / ethics / next move.

Poetry begins after passport control. Visas: check Russia, Mongolia, and China through consular sources before purchase. Photography: never photograph borders, military, police, sensitive installations, or others' documents. Trains: the route must be ticketed in segments. Connections: Irkutsk–Ulaanbaatar and Ulaanbaatar–Beijing services are infrequent — build the calendar around these two departures. Plan B: keep a 48-hour buffer and carry insurance with medical and evacuation cover.

First the two international bridges, then everything else. T-120: secure visas and insurance; choose the Thursday departure from Ulaanbaatar. T-90: confirm K23/24 and 305/306. T-75: work backwards through Ulan-Ude, Irkutsk, Olkhon; book the Mongolian host/fixer. T-60: issue Russian domestic tickets and book cancellable accommodation. T-30: reconfirm timetables, registrations, addresses in Cyrillic/Chinese. T-7: download tickets, maps, translations, release forms; duplicate everything on paper.

Every photograph takes something. Giving back is part of the work. Consent: ask first when the relationship matters; show the result afterwards; accept no without negotiation. Context: never use poverty as scenery; record names, places, work, and words accurately. Giving back: send images, leave prints, keep promises. Safety: no image is worth an interrogation, a risk to a host, or a missed border crossing.

A provisional book of 24 photographs. Eight chapters, one for each stop. 300 words to give the journey a name. Final format: horizontal sequence, eight diptychs, eight breathing-space images, essential captions, a map, and a railway diary. First showing: a silent projection; then the book.