The train car is dark, its interior sinking into shadow. Outside, light rushes outlining on the fly the figures of two young girls enjoying the speed of the fast train, their hair lifted by the wind. One wears a white dress, luminous against the gloom inside. Shot in 1988, Boris Savelev’s Suburban Train, captures more than just movement—it suggests escape, transition, the rush of history itself. The Soviet Union was on the way towards its final years, and here, in the stark contrast between the train’s shadowed interior and the blur of the world outside, lies a suggesting metaphor for a collapsing empire and a future not yet arrived.

Savelev, born in Czernowitz, has always been drawn to these tensions—light and dark, past and present, stasis and momentum. His journey as a photographer is shaped by the medium’s evolving technologies, but also by a persistent, almost obsessive pursuit of color, depth, and mood. His first love was Kodachrome, the legendary film stock he once considered unattainable as a Soviet photographer. Processing had to be done in Kodak labs in the West—an impossibility for those behind the Iron Curtain. But in a stroke of luck, Savelev managed to acquire a cache of unused rolls from APN and TASS photojournalists struggling to come up with a practical solution in their processing. More fortunate possibilities were unexpectedly brought through the collaboration with a French newspaper: instead of a fee for his work, Savelev received hundreds more rolls with pre-paid processing. Thus, for the next two decades, he shot exclusively on his favorite luminous film, smuggling undeveloped rolls to processing labs across Europe and America, until the final Kodachrome lab closed in 2005.

Czernowitz, Savelev’s childhood home, never loosened its grip on him. Once a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Romanian, Soviet, and now Ukrainian, it remained frozen in his mind as the place where his artistic eye was formed. After decades in Moscow, he returned to find it largely unchanged, its once-grand buildings crumbling but familiar. His camera documented not just streets and facades but time itself, as if attempting to hold onto something that had long since slipped away.

His eventual shift to digital was reluctant but inevitable. The transition began on a Moscow-Kaliningrad train, when a fellow photographer asked him if he would ever abandon film. He dismissed the idea then. But by the late 1990s, after witnessing the capabilities of early digital scanning and large-format printing, he started experimenting. A commission in Madrid led to his first digital portfolio, and soon, Savelev was at the forefront of digital printing techniques, working with Factum Arte to develop layered, high-resolution prints on gesso-coated aluminum. If his Kodachrome years were about capturing the elusive richness of color on film, his digital years have been about recreating that depth through painstaking, technical precision.

In Depot, one of his later projects presented in his eighth Portfolio, Savelev turned his attention to trolleybus depots, fascinated by their geometric structures and the interplay of metal, light, and motion. The constructivist chaos of these spaces—poles, crossbars, shadows—became a new obsession. But even here, the past loomed. These trolleybuses, like the Soviet world he had once documented, were vanishing, phased out and replaced by a sleeker, more anonymous cityscape.

Photography, for Savelev, has never just been about documentation. It has been about distillation—of time, of memory, of texture and shadow. The Soviet Union is long gone, Kodachrome is extinct, Czernowitz has changed, and even his own hands, once steady, now require a stabilizing camera. And yet, the essence of his work remains the same.

Perhaps this is why Suburban Train, 1988 feels so emblematic of his career. It is a moment of stillness within motion, a deep shadow against fleeting light. The Soviet world around him was falling apart, but the girls in the window lean into the wind, hair lifted, rushing into whatever comes next. Savelev, ever the observer, remains inside the carriage—watching, waiting, capturing the moment before it vanishes.

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