Artist Statement

The vantage of a train window has been my access point to photograph the American landscape for more than two decades. My first image came in 2002, while traveling from Charlottesville, Virginia, to New York City for a photo expo. I watched the steady transition from rural to suburban to urban environments as the train moved north, catching glimpses of places unfamiliar to me. Mesmerized, I raised my camera to capture these fleeting scenes—marking the beginning of what has become my ongoing project, Passenger. Since then, I have photographed on forty-four Amtrak trips across the United States, as well as routes in Canada, France, and Scandinavia, creating more than 15,000 born-digital photographs.

Passenger is a convergence of nineteenth-century technology and contemporary photographic practice, an extended meditation on time, movement, growth, and the ways in which human presence shapes landscape. The project embraces the constraints of photographing through a train window: reflections, motion blur, weather, and the impossibility of stopping. These conditions have become part of its language. Each image is both precise and shaky, a record of place at a specific moment and a fragment in a larger continuum. The human subject is minimal, as my focus rests on imprint, transformation, and relics—a vernacular built over time to sustain our society.

From this moving vantage, I become both a witness and a thread through history. The rail lines laid during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century charted a path for industrial growth and capitalist ambition, reshaping land and community alike. Out the window, we glimpse the remains and renewals of that legacy: skylines under construction, spaces left unchanged, and landscapes in flux. Passenger reflects on this continuum—how invention and expansion persist, and how the view from a train window continues to reveal the evolving story of connection.

 — Stacey Evans
     November, 2025