Published by Bookdummypress, Tokyo, 2026
Softcover, 128 pages
Dimensions: 7 1/2 × 5 3/4 inches
Published on the occasion of Victor Sira’s solo exhibition Europass (IG Photo Gallery, Tokyo, July 15 – August 2, 2025). The first edition is now sold out.
Note on the second edition:
This new edition introduces a subtle shift rather than a revision. Red typography replaces the original palette, and a small number of new portraits enter the sequence. These changes do not correct the work—they recalibrate its rhythm. The book remains the same in structure, but its tone carries a different pulse.
The exhibition presents photographs made between 2001 and 2006 during Sira’s train journeys across Europe—a pre-iPhone, pre-social media moment he describes as “a time when photography wasn’t yet an omnipresent reflex.”
The title Europass refers to the Eurail Pass, introduced in 1959, which enabled unrestricted travel across Europe. Like many young travelers, Sira moved between cities overnight, often waking in unfamiliar places.
From train windows and station platforms, he observed passing scenes—figures in transit, brief encounters, quiet departures. For Sira, a Venezuelan artist based in the United States, this period marked a formative “voyage of youth.” “The train was my studio,” he recalls, “a moving frame for Europe’s unwritten stories.”
These images echo his later project Points of Entry (supported by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and Luxembourg’s Ministry of Culture), which focuses on migration routes through Calais, Ceuta/Tarifa, and Moldova. Where that work centers on migration, Europass holds people at a distance—figures absorbed into the flow of landscape and memory.
—Kenji Takazawa
(Photography Critic / Director, IG Photo Gallery)
Published by Bookdummypress, Tokyo, 2026
Softcover, 128 pages
Dimensions: 7 1/2 × 5 3/4 inches
Published on the occasion of Victor Sira’s solo exhibition Europass (IG Photo Gallery, Tokyo, July 15 – August 2, 2025). The first edition is now sold out.
Note on the second edition:
This new edition introduces a subtle shift rather than a revision. Red typography replaces the original palette, and a small number of new portraits enter the sequence. These changes do not correct the work—they recalibrate its rhythm. The book remains the same in structure, but its tone carries a different pulse.
The exhibition presents photographs made between 2001 and 2006 during Sira’s train journeys across Europe—a pre-iPhone, pre-social media moment he describes as “a time when photography wasn’t yet an omnipresent reflex.”
The title Europass refers to the Eurail Pass, introduced in 1959, which enabled unrestricted travel across Europe. Like many young travelers, Sira moved between cities overnight, often waking in unfamiliar places.
From train windows and station platforms, he observed passing scenes—figures in transit, brief encounters, quiet departures. For Sira, a Venezuelan artist based in the United States, this period marked a formative “voyage of youth.” “The train was my studio,” he recalls, “a moving frame for Europe’s unwritten stories.”
These images echo his later project Points of Entry (supported by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and Luxembourg’s Ministry of Culture), which focuses on migration routes through Calais, Ceuta/Tarifa, and Moldova. Where that work centers on migration, Europass holds people at a distance—figures absorbed into the flow of landscape and memory.
—Kenji Takazawa
(Photography Critic / Director, IG Photo Gallery)
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