Riding Freight Trains and Darkroom Photography with Sophie Nelson
Sophie Nelson is a Brooklyn-based photographer from Southern California and a graduate of Pratt Institute. Her first time hopping a freight train from Virginia to New York in 2023 sparked an enduring fixation on trains which has shaped her work ever since. Taken while riding freight trains across America, her photographs offer glimpses into the world of rail travel, revealing beauty in abandon, ruin, and wreckage. The physical process of traditional darkroom printing mirrors the age and endurance of the trains themselves, relics of an earlier era traversing the present.
