“This project was born out of failure.”

That’s how Ivan Sigal describes “White Road,” which takes viewers on a dizzying trek through Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. He moved to Russia in 1996 with a documentary grant and a goal: to show, through photographs of landscapes and cityscapes, how “we build in a certain way because we believe a certain way.”

But after two years taking pictures of Soviet and post-Soviet urban spaces and leisure facilities, he declared the project a failure: the images were uninspiring and his own narrative struck him as untruthful, contrived and oversimplified. So, he explained recently, he made a vow to himself: “First images, then ideas.” He would “photograph, learn, absorb, then go back to my work and look for patterns.”

The result of that promise is “White Road,” published by Steidl. The book is divided into two parts: one for photographs, the other for a travel diary.

It is, Mr. Sigal said, “an attempt to put the reader into a space of an endless journey in which you step out of your own space and enter another one — kind of take on the role of a character or the narrator.”