Guayaquil in Motion

I was in Guayaquil on June 28, 2010, for business.

That evening I was downstairs entertaining customers, but before leaving the room I positioned the camera at the window and aimed it toward the traffic below.

I set it to continue making photographs at intervals of roughly six seconds.

The idea was not simply to make a single nighttime photograph. I wanted a sequence of frames that could later be assembled into a video showing the movement of the traffic and the trails of light created as the vehicles passed through the scene.

So while I was downstairs doing my job, the camera remained upstairs doing its own.

Looking at this single frame years later, I can still see the larger idea behind it.

The city is fixed.

The buildings remain.

The road remains.

But the traffic becomes light, and time becomes visible.

Guayaquil in Motion is not simply a nighttime cityscape.

The photograph belongs to a larger experiment in observation and elapsed time.

Colón fixed the camera in position at a window overlooking the traffic below and programmed it to make repeated exposures at intervals of approximately six seconds. The resulting frames were intended to become a moving sequence in which the stationary city would remain constant while vehicles transformed into streams of light.

This frame preserves one moment within that larger process.

The roadway curves through the composition, carrying white and red light trails toward the illuminated urban distance. Buildings, parked vehicles, streetlights, and commercial architecture remain comparatively static while the traffic records the passage of time.

The photographer's physical absence is also significant.

Once the composition and interval sequence had been established, Colón left the camera operating while he returned downstairs to entertain customers.

The camera continued to observe without him.

Most photographs depend on the photographer being there at the moment the shutter is released.

This one did not.

I had already chosen the viewpoint, framed the city, and decided how the camera should observe it.

Then I left.

While I was downstairs talking with customers, the camera remained at the window recording the traffic every few seconds.

There is something I like about that now.

The photograph still came from a decision I made, but I was not standing behind the camera when each frame was created.

The city continued moving whether I was watching or not.

The camera simply kept looking.

Preserved as the forty-seventh accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Guayaquil in Motion joins the Cities collection as an example of photographic experimentation with time, movement, and automated observation.

Made in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on June 28, 2010, the work originated within a sequence of interval exposures captured from a fixed position overlooking nighttime traffic.

The repeated exposures were intended for assembly into a moving-image experiment in which the changing traffic patterns and resulting light trails would contrast with the stability of the surrounding city.

The photograph therefore occupies an unusual position within Colón's archive.

It records a scene the photographer composed and initiated, but did not continuously witness.

Once the camera was positioned and the interval sequence began, the observation continued independently.

The city moved.

The camera kept watching.