Between Stops

I made this photograph on September 6, 2015, while visiting my daughter in New York.

She was living there at the time, and during my visit we spent our days traveling around the city together. I carried my camera with me as we moved from place to place.

On this particular day, we were heading toward the Battery.

We passed through Fulton Street station, and somewhere during that journey I photographed the people waiting across the tracks.

I no longer remember exactly what made me raise the camera.

There was no elaborate plan behind the photograph, and I cannot reconstruct a story that I no longer remember.

What remains is the photograph itself.

Looking at it years later, I notice the people separated by the old steel columns. Some are together. Some are alone. Someone has luggage. Someone looks at a phone. Someone sits and waits.

We were all traveling somewhere.

For a few moments, we simply happened to share the same station.

Between Stops examines one of the least celebrated elements of urban travel: waiting.

Created at Fulton Street subway station in Lower Manhattan, the photograph looks across the tracks toward passengers occupying the opposite platform.

The station's steel columns divide the composition into a sequence of narrow spaces. Within them, individuals and small groups appear almost as separate scenes: people conversing, standing alone, carrying belongings, looking at a phone, or sitting quietly.

The photographer does not remember the specific impulse that caused him to make the exposure. That absence of recollection becomes significant within the work.

Rather than reconstructing an intention that cannot be verified, the photograph is allowed to speak through what it preserved.

The resulting image is an observation of people temporarily brought together by infrastructure and separated again by their individual destinations.

We remember destinations.

We remember where we were going and sometimes who was beside us.

But much of every journey happens somewhere in between.

A platform. A hallway. A station. A few minutes waiting for the next train.

Around us are people doing exactly the same thing.

We do not know where they came from.

We do not know where they are going.

For a moment, our journeys intersect.

Then a train arrives.

Everyone moves again.

Years later, I may not remember why I took the photograph.

But the photograph remembers that we were there.

Preserved as the forty-first accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Between Stops documents passengers waiting at Fulton Street subway station in New York City on September 6, 2015.

The photograph was created while the artist was traveling with his daughter toward the Battery during a visit to New York.

Its composition is structured by the station's steel columns, which divide the opposite platform into a succession of spaces occupied by individuals and small groups.

Unlike works whose creation is accompanied by a detailed personal recollection, the specific photographic impulse behind Between Stops has not been retained in the artist's memory.

The Studio record deliberately preserves that uncertainty rather than reconstructing an undocumented intention.

Within the Journeys collection, the photograph considers the periods of waiting that exist between destinations and the temporary communities formed when unrelated travelers occupy the same place.