Arrival Through Rain

I had just arrived in Santiago.

I had come during a period when the direction of my own life was uncertain. I needed some distance from everything familiar, and there was someone there I wanted to see.

It was raining as the taxi carried me from the airport toward the hotel.

I remember looking through the window and becoming interested in the raindrops on the glass.

I wasn't trying to photograph Santiago through the rain.

I was trying to photograph the rain itself.

I wanted the iPhone to focus on the drops.

It wouldn't.

I kept trying, but I could never get them as sharp as I wanted. The rain remained somewhere between clear and indistinct, while Santiago existed beyond it.

At the time, that was simply a technical frustration.

Eleven years later, I see something else.

I was sitting between two places — no longer where I had been, but not yet where I was going. Outside the window was a city I had deliberately traveled to, and somewhere within that city was someone I had come to see.

Yet the thing immediately in front of me was the one thing I couldn't bring into focus.

There is an irony in that now.

At that point in my life, there were other things I couldn't bring into focus either.

I don't believe the photograph predicted anything. I don't think the rain was a metaphor when I pressed the shutter.

But photographs sometimes acquire meaning because we eventually know what happened after them.

Today I don't see a failed attempt to photograph raindrops.

I see myself arriving somewhere before I knew where I was going.

Arrival Through Rain occupies an unusual position within Francisco Colón's archive because the meaning recognized in the photograph today was not the meaning intended when it was made.

The original intention was remarkably simple.

Colón saw raindrops covering the window of a taxi and attempted to photograph them.

The iPhone 5 struggled to focus on the surface of the glass. The droplets never achieved the clarity he wanted, while Santiago remained visible but softened beyond them.

What was originally a technical frustration acquired another dimension when Colón returned to the photograph eleven years later.

At the time of its creation, he had arrived in Santiago during a period of personal uncertainty. He knew his immediate destination: the taxi was taking him from the airport toward his hotel, and he had traveled to Chile to see someone important to him.

What he could not have known was where that journey, that relationship, or that period of his life would ultimately lead.

The photograph therefore contains a distinction that became visible only retrospectively:

Knowing where one is going is not necessarily the same as knowing where one is headed.

This interpretation does not assign symbolic intention to the original act of photography. The raindrops were not conceived as a metaphor, nor was their imperfect focus deliberate.

The significance emerged later, when the photographer who knew what happened next encountered the photograph made by the man who did not.

There is a difference between knowing where you are going and knowing where you are headed.

That morning, I knew where I was going.

Santiago.

The Sheraton.

Her.

Those things were clear.

What wasn't clear was where my life was headed.

I didn't think about any of that while sitting in the taxi. I was looking at raindrops on a window and trying to make an iPhone focus on them.

It frustrated me that I couldn't.

There is something almost amusing about that now.

I was trying so hard to bring into focus something immediately in front of me while much larger things in my life were equally unresolved.

But I have to be careful with that interpretation.

The rain wasn't a metaphor when I photographed it.

The camera wasn't trying to tell me something.

I know that because I remember what I was actually doing.

I simply wanted a photograph of the raindrops.

The meaning came later.

Maybe that is one of the things photographs can do.

They preserve a moment without requiring us to understand it.

Then years pass.

We change.

We learn what happened next.

And occasionally we return to an old photograph and discover that although the image hasn't changed, the person looking at it has.

I couldn't bring the raindrops completely into focus that morning.

Maybe I didn't need to.

The photograph preserved exactly where I was:

somewhere between an arrival and an answer.

Preserved as the forty-ninth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Arrival Through Rain belongs to the Journeys collection.

The photograph was made on August 6, 2015, from inside a taxi shortly after Colón arrived in Santiago, Chile.

Its foreground subject — raindrops covering the taxi window — was intentional. Its imperfect focus was not.

Using an Apple iPhone 5, Colón attempted repeatedly to focus on the droplets but was unable to achieve the precision he wanted. Santiago remained visible beyond the glass, softened by rain, distance, and the limitations of the camera.

The photograph's later significance emerged through retrospective interpretation rather than original symbolic intention.

Colón had traveled to Santiago during a period of uncertainty in his own life and to see the woman connected to a long-distance relationship that would later provide the narrative foundation for his album Fronteras y Ecos.

That biographical connection establishes provenance, but it does not transform the raindrops into a symbol deliberately created in 2015.

Instead, Arrival Through Rain demonstrates another function of the photographic archive: its ability to preserve moments whose significance may not become apparent until much later.

The photographer who made the image knew his destination.

The photographer who returned to it eleven years later knew what happened afterward.

Between them remains the photograph:

a rain-covered window, a city beyond it, and a moment that had not yet resolved.