Life Inside the Caldera

I was in Quito in June 2010 and stayed through the weekend. With no business obligations for the day, I decided to spend the time with my camera.

My taxi driver took me to Pululahua for lunch. I had not gone there specifically intending to make this photograph. I simply arrived at a place that immediately made me want to stop and look.

Below me was an enormous volcanic caldera. Its steep green walls disappeared into clouds, while farms, roads, homes, and individual fields spread across the floor below. Light moved through openings in the clouds and illuminated portions of the landscape while other areas remained in shadow.

I photographed what I was seeing as a panorama using bracketed exposures because a single exposure could not hold the range of light across the scene.

Sixteen years later, while returning to the original photographs, I reconstructed the panorama from three separately stitched bracketed versions and blended their exposures by hand.

What continues to hold my attention is not simply the size of Pululahua.

It is the discovery that inside this enormous volcanic landscape, people are living ordinary lives.

What first appears to be wilderness is also somebody's home.

Life Inside the Caldera examines scale through observation.

The photograph initially presents Pululahua as an immense natural formation: steep volcanic walls, shifting clouds, mist, and changing light. Only after the eye moves deeper into the image do roads, agricultural fields, buildings, and cultivated boundaries reveal another dimension of the landscape.

Human presence is not dominant. It is discovered.

This relationship between the monumental and the ordinary is characteristic of Francisco Colón's observational approach. The camera records the remarkable landscape, but attention eventually settles on the quieter evidence of people living within it.

The work also reflects the circumstances under which many of Colón's photographs were made. A free weekend during a business trip became an opportunity to explore with a camera, allowing an unexpected destination to become part of the visual record.

Sometimes we understand why we made a photograph immediately.

Sometimes the explanation arrives years later.

I did not travel to Pululahua that morning with a photograph already in mind. I was simply spending a free day with my camera when a taxi driver brought me somewhere for lunch.

Then I saw this.

The mountains were enormous. Clouds moved through them. Light appeared and disappeared across the valley.

But when I look more closely now, what stays with me are the smaller things.

The fields. The roads. The houses.

Life continuing inside something ancient and immense.

In 2010, I did not have a name for the way I photographed.

I only knew when something made me look.

The camera apparently understood the rest.

Preserved as the forty-fifth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Life Inside the Caldera joins the Nature collection as both landscape and record of observation.

The work documents the Pululahua volcanic caldera in Ecuador while directing attention toward the relationship between geological scale and everyday human habitation.

Its technical history is also preserved as part of the work. Multiple bracketed panoramic sequences made in 2010 were manually reconstructed and exposure-blended in 2026 after independent panorama stitching produced incompatible geometries.

The finished image retains the natural differences between illuminated farmland, shadowed volcanic walls, mist, and cloud rather than equalizing those elements through an exaggerated HDR treatment.

Within the broader Photography Wing, the photograph provides early evidence of a visual tendency that would become increasingly visible across Colón's archive: attention not only to destinations, but to what unexpectedly reveals itself while moving through the world.