A Passage by Liberty

I flew to New York to spend a few days with my daughter. We went to the Battery and boarded a boat so we could get close to the Statue of Liberty and look back toward Manhattan. I made this photograph while she was there with me.

The statue has been part of my life in a way that is a little difficult to explain. In 1976, when I was in seventh grade, my art teacher asked me to draw it for the country's two-hundredth anniversary. I spent time looking at its shape long before I ever made this photograph.

On the boat, I saw the sailboat move across the water with the statue behind it. I photographed what was in front of me. What makes the image personal is also outside its frame: my daughter was beside me, and I was glad we had come there together.

The sailboat occupies the left foreground, its dark sails rising against a narrow band of orange sky. The Statue of Liberty stands farther back near the center, illuminated above the darker mass of Liberty Island. Their different scales and distances keep the two subjects distinct while placing them in the same visual passage.

The cool blue water forms a broad foreground beneath the warm horizon. Above it, the uncluttered sky gives the statue's raised torch and the boat's rigging room to remain legible. The boat supplies movement; the statue provides a fixed point. Colón's timing brings them into relationship without making either object stand in for the personal history that the photograph's accompanying account preserves.

A place can remain familiar across decades while the people who arrive there change. As a schoolboy, Colón approached the statue through the work of drawing it. In 2015, he approached it by water with his daughter.

She is not visible in the photograph. Her presence belongs to the memory of its making, which gives the image a second way to be read. The sailboat passes through the frame; the statue remains; the time spent together cannot be seen, but it can be remembered.

A Passage by Liberty is preserved in the Journeys collection as a photograph of a shared visit and a documented return to a subject from the artist's childhood. The collection record distinguishes the visible scene—the sailboat, Liberty Island, the statue, and the evening light—from Colón's account of traveling with his daughter and remembering his 1976 school drawing.

The work extends the Photography Wing's interest in how a later photograph can connect separate periods of a life. Its archival value rests in both the image and the circumstances Colón has supplied about making it.