Travel nominee

The doors open and a robotic, yet friendly voice greets you over the speakers as you board.

“Welcome to the Shinkansen. This is the Hikari Super Express bound to Shin-Ōsaka.”

Onboard, you stare at your watch to confirm if there’s truth to the timeliness. Sure enough, the doors close, and you pull away at the scheduled time. To the second.

Travel back home has conditioned you to expect music blasting from cell phones. People gabbing on calls.

But there isn’t. And there aren’t.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Inside this train, all you hear is a soft hum. Your perception of what public transportation can be instantly shifts. From the outside, this machine is just steel, aluminum alloy, and wheels barreling down the track. Metal cutting through the air like a speeding bullet. Yet somehow, it takes on a personality of its own. There’s a life to the train, and of course the lives and stories within.

This mechanical marvel reflects the engineering prowess and infrastructure of Japan, but also serves as a window into its people. The decency, respect, attention to detail, and insistence on quality that each person shows towards something that, ultimately, belongs to all of them.

Eric Kanigan is a Canadian-American photographer and storyteller who is driven to visit remote corners of the globe to highlight commonalities where others might initially perceive differences.

A degree in Biology solidified his affinity for wildlife and the natural world. However, it was a specific focus in ecology that left the largest impression. The core premise that organisms and species are intertwined, no matter how disparate in form and function, inspires much of his work today.

Eric brings his audience with him above and below the surface to bear witness to some of the world’s most striking scenes and beings. He seeks images with the intent to bring them to life as physical prints—a permanence and longevity he creates with the finished piece, but more importantly, wants to observe in the subjects through conservation and action. Through his artwork and writing, Eric ventures beyond a simple image—not to lecture, but to inspire individuals to develop their own thoughts on the environmental, social, and ethical questions that we face today.

He hopes that others might recognize some of themselves in the people and the animals with whom we are fortunate to share our planet.