Broken Promises

I created this photograph while walking through La Recoleta in Buenos Aires.

At first glance, it appeared to be nothing more than a damaged political sign left on the ground after an earlier visit by Hugo Chávez.

What drew me closer was not the political figure itself, but the way the sign had begun to fall apart.

Standing there, I realized I was no longer looking at political advertising.

I was looking at a metaphor.

The torn image suggested promises that had once been presented as whole, certain, and permanent—but which time had reduced to fragments.

What keeps bringing me back to Broken Promises is the feeling that the photograph contains more than the subject I first noticed. With time, I began to understand it through how meaning changes when a moment is reconsidered from a later vantage point. I do not want the image to explain the memory for the viewer or to pretend that I remember more than I do. I want it to preserve the part that remains true: where I stood, what caught my attention, and why the frame still asks me to look again.

Political signs are created to persuade.

Time transforms them into historical artifacts.

Torn, weathered, and abandoned beneath passing footsteps, Broken Promises invites viewers to consider how public ideals evolve once speeches end and history continues.

The photograph neither endorses nor condemns the figure represented. Instead, it reflects on the fragile relationship between hope, certainty, memory, and the passage of time.

Curatorially, Broken Promises is strongest when read through the visual evidence of transition rather than a fixed state. The composition does not require a dramatic event to justify its place in the collection; its meaning develops through relationships inside the frame—distance, scale, structure, atmosphere, and the distribution of visual weight. That restraint is important. It allows the photograph to carry the theme of transformation through form as well as through biography, giving the work an independent visual life while remaining connected to the artist’s experience.

Every society leaves behind symbols.

Time decides which become monuments...

and which become fragments.

Torn paper reminds us that ideas, like photographs, continue changing long after they are created.

Sometimes history survives not through what was carefully preserved...

but through what was left behind.

The photograph ultimately raises a question about how meaning changes when a moment is reconsidered from a later vantage point. A camera can hold the appearance of a moment, but it cannot hold the entire experience surrounding it. That limitation gives Broken Promises much of its power. What is absent is not a flaw to be repaired; it is the space in which memory continues to work. The image remains fixed while the person returning to it does not.

Preserved as the ninth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Broken Promises expands the collection's exploration of memory into the public sphere.

By transforming a discarded political artifact into a broader reflection on history and impermanence, the work demonstrates how ordinary urban details can acquire enduring symbolic meaning.

Within the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Broken Promises is retained as part of the archive as a record of change in both subject and interpretation. Its importance is therefore not measured only by subject matter or visual appeal. The work helps establish a recurring Studio principle: personal history can be preserved with emotional depth while the archive remains disciplined about the difference between what the photograph shows, what the artist remembers, and what later interpretation can responsibly infer.