Photographer John M Francis is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Moments in Transition ’. To see John’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Moments in Transition is a body of work that is a meditation on motion and time in the landscape. This body of work is the result of a photographic journey that began in 2009 during a 120-minute train ride from Nagoya to Matsumoto, Japan. I continued taking photographs from trains in Japan while visiting over the course of years. While visiting Germany I used the same techniques. The images are unified by the creative and conceptual process with which I make them.

I deliberately used a slow shutter speed which blurs the images and because of the speed of travel I relinquished some of my usual control in composing the images. The resultant images from this effort are completely spontaneous and altogether surprising to me. As I meditated on things seen clearly in the distance, the nearby scene is gone in a blur before I could resolve its mystery. In those images one instant seems to kaleidoscope into the next. In these transitory moments are juxtapositions, the near with the far, the passing of what is with what will be. I have taken artistic license with exposure, color, and general image corrections. These images are not the result of multiple images on layers combined into one using software.

Each image isn’t just one discrete parcel of reality, but many moments in time woven together. These photographs posed questions for me that challenged my notions of time and ultimately, human perception. Meaning they revealed that light, motion, and composition captured in this process, are a series of moments of reality that the eye is normally blind to.

The photographs are not just static representations of place but also temporal segments that are both fleeting and frozen simultaneously. In these photographs, the subjects flow across the image in the same way as time flows. I feel that these works share something with the Japanese philosophy that all things are constantly changing.