Around the Corner

I went out that evening with a taxi driver because I wanted to photograph Guayaquil at night.

There was no larger project behind this photograph. I was exploring the city and photographing what caught my attention.

This street did.

The colorful buildings, the cobblestones, the nighttime light, and the narrow passage between the architecture all brought my camera toward the same place: the bend at the end of the street.

I cannot see what is around the corner.

That seems much more significant to me now than it did when I made the photograph.

Years later, while looking through my older work, I began noticing how often I photographed stairs, corridors, arches, streets, windows, and other passages that lead somewhere beyond what the photograph allows us to see.

I don't remember thinking about any of that when I stood here in 2010.

I simply saw the street and photographed it.

Maybe the camera was already showing me something about the way I look at the world before I had learned how to describe it.

Around the Corner transforms an ordinary urban street into a visual passage.

The cobblestones begin broadly in the foreground and progressively narrow as they move between the buildings. Rooflines, sidewalks, façades, and architectural edges reinforce the same movement, directing attention toward the illuminated buildings near the end of the visible street.

Then the route disappears.

There is no monument or dominant landmark waiting at the vanishing point. The destination is withheld by the street itself.

This characteristic places Around the Corner within a recurring visual tendency found throughout Francisco Colón's archive. Staircases, corridors, arches, windows, streets, and other transitional spaces repeatedly appear as structures that encourage the viewer to continue beyond the immediately visible scene.

Significantly, this interpretation was not imposed as a photographic concept at the time of capture. Colón remembers going into Guayaquil that evening simply intending to photograph the city at night.

The recurring pattern became apparent only through later examination of the archive.

What interests me about this photograph today is not only what is in it.

It is what isn't.

The street gives me somewhere to go.

The cobblestones lead forward. The buildings close around the route. Light appears farther ahead.

And then the street turns.

Whatever comes next remains outside the photograph.

I made this image sixteen years before I began seriously examining the patterns within my own photography. At the time, I wasn't thinking about passages or destinations that could not be seen.

I was photographing a street in Guayaquil because it caught my attention.

Now I understand a little better why it did.

Preserved as the forty-eighth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Around the Corner joins the Cities collection as an early example of a recurring compositional tendency within the artist's archive.

The photograph was made in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on June 28, 2010, during an evening devoted specifically to photographing the city after dark.

Its importance within the collection lies not in a predetermined conceptual intention, but in what later examination revealed.

Across photographs made in different countries, years, and circumstances, Colón repeatedly positioned stairways, streets, corridors, arches, windows, and other passages so that they lead toward spaces that remain partially or completely unseen.

Around the Corner demonstrates that tendency through the simplest of urban structures: a street that refuses to reveal where it goes.

The work also exists in two historically distinct interpretations. An earlier edit was published commercially and developed its own history of views, comments, and a recorded sale. In 2026, Colón returned to the photograph and created a more restrained restoration for the Studio archive.

The commercial version records how the photograph entered the world.

The Studio version records how the photographer sees it now.