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In Passing series by Aya Takashima photographed in Japan. Location includes Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo.
These photographs were made from a moving vehicle in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, Japan. Most of the time, the people in the photographs were unaware of a camera photographing them. I found stories with humor, curiosity, and irony in the photographs. Every once in a while, the subject was aware. They returned the gaze, and, at that point, I realized that I was no longer an observer but a participant in their story. In passing, I captured a split second of the world around me. A second before and the second after existed, but those moments will never be revealed.
Photography is remembering the names of things I once saw. The mechanism of a camera and the interaction of light, as well as movement, reveal what I might not have seen. The sense of motion blurs that line between an immediate understanding and a gradual awareness of what is happening within the scene. My interest lies in the hyper-reality and pseudo-concreteness that photography depicting motion can offer. The notion of how one crosses the threshold of perceptual understanding fascinates me, more specifically, the awareness of one perceiving oneself perceiving. There is a tension between selective focus and motion blur that facilitates the awareness of how well one thinks and sees the world around them.