Beside the Road

Something about this tree caught my attention as I passed it beside the road.

I don't remember exactly what I was looking for that day. What the photographs tell me is that I knew there was something here worth exploring.

This was the first frame.

At this distance, I was still seeing the tree as part of everything around it.

The road was in front of me. The fences crossed the property and turned into the pasture. Horses stood in the distance. Behind the tree were the greens of the surrounding landscape, while the remaining red leaves separated themselves from both the background and the pale December sky.

I had not yet isolated the tree from its surroundings.

I had not yet moved beneath its canopy.

At this moment, I was simply looking at a tree beside the road.

And then I kept looking.

Beside the Road is the opening photograph in a sequence Francisco Colón made of the same tree near Killeen, Texas, on December 24, 2017.

Unlike the later photographs Standing Alone and Under Its Canopy, this image retains a broad sense of the surrounding environment. The roadway establishes the photographer's position outside the pasture, while fencing crosses the composition and turns inward near the base of the tree. Horses visible in the distance further identify the setting as an active rural landscape.

The tree nevertheless dominates the composition. Its mostly bare upper branches spread into the pale sky while clusters of remaining red foliage occupy the lower canopy. Dry yellow-brown ground, green vegetation, white and gray fencing, and the red leaves create distinct layers of color throughout the frame.

The photograph is significant within the larger sequence not because it represents a preliminary or incomplete version of the later photographs, but because it preserves a different relationship between the tree and its surroundings.

Here, the landscape remains part of the subject.

Years later, I can look at the photographs from that afternoon in sequence.

This one came first.

What followed shows me moving around the tree, changing the composition, turning the camera vertically and horizontally, and continuing to look.

Eventually I made Standing Alone.

Then I went closer and made Under Its Canopy.

I don't want hindsight to convince me that I understood all of that while I was standing beside the road.

I didn't.

What I know is simpler.

Something about this tree held my attention.

This photograph preserves the way I first encountered it, before the surroundings began to fall away and before I moved close enough to experience the space beneath its branches.

Sometimes the first photograph is not the answer.

It is simply where the looking begins.

Made near Killeen, Texas, on December 24, 2017, Beside the Road is the earliest identified exposure in a sustained photographic study of the same mature tree.

The original file, 425A5160, begins a sequence in which Colón repeatedly changed viewpoint, orientation, and composition while working around the subject.

Two later photographs from the encounter became independent works in the Francisco Colón Studio collection: Standing Alone, made from file 425A5174, and Under Its Canopy, made from file 425A5176.

Viewed together, the three photographs reveal progressively different relationships between photographer, subject, and environment. Beside the Road preserves the tree within the larger rural landscape. Standing Alone emphasizes the tree as an individual visual presence. Under Its Canopy moves closer to examine the color, structure, and space beneath its branches.

There is no indication that Colón planned this progression while photographing. The relationship became apparent only when the surviving sequence was reconsidered years later.