Into Mindo

While staying in Quito in June 2010, I had a free weekend and decided to spend it exploring with my camera.

On June 26, I traveled to Mindo.

What struck me immediately was the contrast. The landscape I had experienced around Quito seemed dry and almost desert-like to me. Mindo felt completely different. It was dense, tropical, green, and filled with butterflies.

I photographed this staircase as it climbed through the vegetation.

Years later, what draws me back to the photograph is remarkably simple.

I don't know what is at the top of the stairs.

The wooden rails enter from opposite sides of the frame and lead upward. The steps continue through the vegetation, but the destination remains hidden.

I know that I climbed those stairs.

I know that somewhere beyond the photograph there was an answer.

But the photograph does not give it to me.

Perhaps that is why I still want to follow it.

Into Mindo is built around a destination the photograph refuses to reveal.

Two wooden rails enter from the lower edges of the frame and converge toward a staircase ascending through dense vegetation. Light increases toward the upper portion of the image, encouraging the eye to follow the same path a person would physically travel.

Yet the staircase disappears before its destination becomes visible.

That withholding is central to the photograph.

Across Francisco Colón's archive, passages, stairways, arches, corridors, windows, and openings appear repeatedly. They frequently function not simply as architectural subjects, but as invitations to look beyond the immediate frame.

Into Mindo provides an early example of that recurring visual tendency.

The photograph does not document what was found at the top of the stairs.

It preserves the desire to find out.

I remember being surprised by Mindo.

I had not traveled very far, yet the landscape seemed to have changed completely.

Everything felt greener, denser, and more alive.

But years later, this photograph does not hold me because of the vegetation.

It holds me because I cannot see where the stairs end.

There is enough information to make me follow them.

Not enough to tell me what I will find.

Maybe some photographs remain with us because they preserve what we saw.

Others remain because they preserve what we still want to know.

Preserved as the forty-sixth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Into Mindo joins the Journeys collection as an early expression of a recurring visual language within the artist's archive.

Stairways, passages, corridors, arches, windows, and other transitional spaces repeatedly appear in Colón's photography. Rather than functioning solely as architectural subjects, these structures often direct attention toward something beyond the immediate viewpoint.

In Into Mindo, that destination remains unavailable to the viewer.

The photograph also preserves an element of photographic improvisation. Although Colón had intended to photograph the day's journey with his Canon EOS Rebel T1i, its battery remained charging at his hotel in Quito. The photograph was therefore made with the Sony DSC-W90 compact camera he carried with him.

Sixteen years later, the technical limitation has become secondary to what the photograph reveals about the photographer's way of seeing.

The camera changed.

The photographer kept looking.