Between Shifts

I made this photograph during an early morning walk through downtown Mexico City.

I had gone out specifically because I wanted to photograph the city while it was beginning to wake. The streets had a different rhythm at that hour. People were arriving, businesses were opening, and the movement of the working day was beginning to take shape.

Then I noticed this man sitting on a bench.

His head was lowered beneath his hood. A backpack rested securely between his legs, and his entire posture suggested someone deeply tired.

My first thought was that he might be waiting for transportation to take him to work.

Then I reconsidered.

At that hour, it was equally possible that he had already worked through the night and was waiting to go home.

The photograph gives me evidence, but it does not give me the answer.

There is the backpack.

There is the early hour.

There are people already active behind him.

And there is a man whose body appears to be asking for a few more minutes of rest.

I do not know whether his workday was beginning or ending.

That uncertainty became the photograph.

Between Shifts is structured around stillness within an environment already beginning to move.

The seated figure occupies the lower-right portion of the composition, his dark clothing and folded posture creating a concentrated visual weight against the lighter pavement. His hood obscures his face, denying the viewer an expression through which to interpret the moment.

A backpack positioned between his legs provides one of the image's few narrative clues. It suggests travel, movement, or preparation without establishing a destination.

Behind him, the vertical iron fence divides the composition into repeated narrow sections. Beyond it, other figures appear upright and active within the morning environment. The contrast is not necessarily one of exclusion; rather, it distinguishes two different states occurring simultaneously—activity and rest.

The photograph does not establish whether the man is traveling toward work, returning from it, or waiting for another purpose entirely. Its strength lies in preserving that ambiguity rather than resolving it.

Cities rarely sleep all at once.

While one person is opening a door for the morning, another may be closing one behind a night of work.

We pass each other somewhere between those two worlds.

Looking at this man, I can see his fatigue more clearly than I can understand its cause.

The backpack tells me he is going somewhere.

The hour tells me the day is changing.

His posture tells me that, at least for this moment, movement has stopped.

But the photograph cannot tell me whether he is gathering the strength to begin his workday or finally allowing himself to rest after completing it.

Perhaps that is what stayed with me.

We see people every day at bus stops, railway platforms, sidewalks, benches, and street corners. We encounter them somewhere in the middle of their journey and instinctively try to imagine what came before or what will happen next.

Most of the time, we never know.

For a few seconds on an early morning in Mexico City, his path and mine crossed.

He rested.

I photographed.

Then both of us continued toward destinations the other would never know.

Between Shifts enters the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing as an observation of working life through an unresolved moment of rest.

Created during an early morning photographic walk through Mexico City, the work records a seated man whose backpack, posture, and surroundings suggest movement between destinations while providing no reliable evidence of where he had been or where he was going.

The title preserves the artist's interpretation without presenting that interpretation as documented fact. The man may have been traveling toward work, returning from a completed shift, or waiting for an unrelated reason.

Within People & Daily Life, the photograph continues the Studio's interest in brief public encounters and in the distinction between visible evidence and imagined biography.

The work therefore preserves not an answer, but an interval: a human being temporarily still while the city around him continues to move.