Passengers in Passing

I made these photographs on September 5, 2015, while visiting my daughter, who was living in New York at the time.

I was spending a few days with her, and she had become my tour guide through the city. We traveled from the Yonkers area into Manhattan, going from train to train and spending the day together.

I carried my camera with me.

While we were standing on the subway platform, a train began passing in front of us. On the spur of the moment, I decided to photograph it. I kept the camera as still as I could and continued making photographs as the train moved across my view.

At the time, I had no idea what I was going to do with those photographs.

It was only later, when I began stacking the images, that I started to see something I had not planned.

In one photograph, one passenger might be more visible through a window. In another, someone else appeared more clearly. The train was moving, but for a fraction of a second the camera had caught these individual people inside it.

I began masking the photographs together, carefully preserving those moments when individual passengers could be seen.

What started as a spontaneous sequence of photographs became a single composition assembled from different moments during the train's passage.

The final photograph was not something I saw when I pressed the shutter.

I discovered it afterward.

Passengers in Passing originated not from a predetermined concept but from experimentation.

While visiting New York City with his daughter in September 2015, Francisco Colón photographed a subway train as it moved past the platform at 86th Street in Manhattan. Holding his position as steadily as possible, he created a sequence of exposures as successive subway cars passed before him.

The artistic construction occurred later.

After stacking the photographs, Colón discovered that different passengers became visible at different moments in the sequence. Through selective masking, he combined those separate instants into a single composition.

The resulting image creates an unusual relationship between movement and visibility. The train continues to rush through the frame while individual passengers briefly emerge from within it.

Rather than documenting one instant, the finished work contains several moments of the train's passage existing together.

The work demonstrates the distinction between intention and discovery. The final image was not conceived before the exposures were made. Its form emerged through the later process of looking, selecting, and constructing.

Most photographs preserve a fraction of a second.

This one preserves several.

A train moves past.

Through one window, a passenger appears.

A moment later, someone else becomes visible.

Then another.

None remains for long.

The train does not stop for the camera, and the people inside it do not know that they are being preserved.

They simply continue on their way.

Only later do the separate moments meet.

What began as movement becomes memory.

What passed in seconds remains within a single frame.

Preserved as the fortieth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Passengers in Passing examines movement, time, and photographic construction within the everyday environment of the New York City subway.

Created from a sequence of photographs made at the 86th Street station on September 5, 2015, the work combines selected portions of multiple exposures through manual masking.

Individual passengers visible at different moments during the train's passage were retained within the final composition, allowing separate instants to coexist within a single image.

The visible motion blur was not removed or corrected. It remains essential to the work, preserving the contrast between the continuous movement of the train and the momentary visibility of the people inside it.

Passengers in Passing expands the Journeys collection by considering travel not only as movement between destinations, but as a succession of brief human encounters that ordinarily disappear as quickly as they appear.