Between the Bars

While living in Mexico City, I often walked with my camera and photographed whatever caught my attention along the way.

Looking down at the street, it was not the entire avenue that made me stop.

It was one opening in the railing.

Through that narrow space, the cars had lined themselves up almost perfectly, one behind another.

The green car gave me a starting point, and from there the line continued deeper and deeper into the street.

That was my photograph.

Everything visible through the openings to the left and right was simply what happened to be around it.

The traffic.

The signs.

The buildings.

The activity of the city.

What caught my eye was much simpler.

One series of cars, momentarily lined up between two bars.

Between the Bars uses an existing architectural obstruction as an integral part of the composition.

Rather than attempting to photograph around the railing, Colón allowed its heavy horizontal and vertical structure to divide the view of Mexico City into a sequence of narrow openings.

The photograph's intended subject occupies the opening near the center of the composition, where a bright green automobile begins a tightly aligned column of vehicles extending into the distance.

The neighboring openings provide environmental context but were not the photographer's original subject. Their traffic, signs, vegetation, buildings and commercial elements were incidental to the observation that prompted the exposure.

The final crop preserves enough of those neighboring openings to establish the railing and the larger city while giving greater visual emphasis to the single alignment Colón originally noticed.

The result distinguishes between the complexity recorded by the camera and the much narrower observation that caused the photograph to be made.

Sometimes an old photograph does not need a new meaning.

Sometimes it simply needs to show more clearly what made you stop in the first place.

Looking at this photograph now, I can see everything the camera recorded around that moment.

The signs.

The traffic.

The buildings.

The neighboring openings in the railing.

But those were not what I was photographing.

I remember the one thing that caught my attention.

The cars had lined themselves up inside one narrow opening.

For however long that arrangement lasted, the railing stopped being something in my way.

It became the frame.

One car would move and the arrangement would change.

Another would advance and it would disappear altogether.

But for that fraction of a second, everything I was looking at lined up.

The photograph kept it that way.

Preserved as the one hundred forty-third accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Between the Bars was made in Mexico City, Mexico, on December 1, 2018.

The photograph was created during one of Colón's camera walks while he was living in Mexico.

From an elevated position, a foreground railing divided the avenue below into a series of narrow vertical views.

Colón's attention was drawn specifically to one of those openings, where a column of automobiles had temporarily aligned within the boundaries created by the railing.

The photograph's wider surroundings were incidental to that original observation. The neighboring openings nevertheless preserve the active urban environment in which the alignment occurred.

The final composition retains those surrounding fragments while emphasizing the opening containing the intended subject.

Within the Studio archive, Between the Bars is an example of observational photography in which an ordinary and temporary spatial relationship becomes the reason for making the photograph. The scene did not need to be rearranged. It needed to be noticed before it changed.