A boy watches as Jamie Hawkesworth passes the couchette the child’s family is riding in on the Trans-Siberian Railway as it runs from Moscow to Beijing. As his parents play chess, the boy hangs upside down from his upper berth, poised and perfectly still as he addresses Hawkesworth’s lens. The scene evokes the strange comfort that travel sometimes produces when, close to one’s nearest in small surroundings, the world unfurls on the other side of the window.
Since making his name in fashion photography, Hawkesworth has used any available space in his work schedule to go on trips to places he hasn’t visited before. This desire arises from his wanderlust about the United Kingdom, the island nation he lives in, and the vastness of the lands that lie beyond. But rather than being a means to establish himself as a travel photographer, the trips have served as opportunities to simply take photographs of people in the places he finds them. For Hawkesworth, it’s not so much about his journey, or destinations visited, but about the journeys of those he meets along the way: the world is the means to illuminate an upside-down boy as sunlight shines through the train’s window, to make us think of his view of the world in that topsy-turvy moment.
The pictures in this issue of , the majority of which are published here for the first time, are a
