Standing Alone

I had noticed this tree many times before I photographed it.

It stood near my ex-wife's home in Killeen, Texas, along a road I had driven repeatedly. Every time I passed, the tree caught my attention. I kept thinking that one day I wanted to come back and photograph it.

On December 24, 2017, I was walking through the area with my camera, doing what I have apparently done for much of my photographic life: photographing random things that caught my eye.

This time, I stopped for the tree.

I have always been attracted to trees, but there is something particular about a tree standing largely by itself.

The flamboyán trees I photograph in Puerto Rico carry a different meaning for me. They are tied to place, memory, and nostalgia.

A solitary tree touches something else.

When I look back over my life, being alone appears again and again.

As a child in New Jersey, there were times when I sat alone in a dark apartment with a candle. I walked alone to school. In Puerto Rico, I often walked by myself going to and from the basketball court. As I grew older, solitude continued to be part of the way I moved through the world.

I do not remember standing in Killeen that afternoon consciously thinking about any of those things.

I simply knew that I liked this tree.

Years later, I understand something about why.

It stands apart without appearing incomplete.

It occupies its own space.

There is also the road.

It curves around the landscape and disappears beyond what the photograph allows us to see.

That feels familiar too.

I know what right now brings.

I don't know what later or tomorrow will allow me to see.

Perhaps that is why I kept noticing this tree.

Somewhere in the way it stood alone, I recognized something I already knew.

Standing Alone belongs to a recurring visual language emerging within Francisco Colón's photographic archive: solitary subjects, transitional spaces, and routes whose destinations remain outside the frame.

The photograph was made near Killeen, Texas, on December 24, 2017. Colón had noticed the tree repeatedly while driving through the area and had developed a desire to photograph it before eventually returning with his camera.

Its significance was not constructed consciously at the moment of capture.

Colón describes the original act much more simply: he was walking through the area photographing whatever caught his attention.

The photograph nevertheless preserves two visual elements that would acquire deeper autobiographical meaning.

The first is the tree itself. Standing largely apart from the surrounding vegetation, it reflects Colón's longstanding attraction to solitary trees—an attraction he now connects with a life in which solitude has repeatedly accompanied childhood, movement, travel, and observation.

The second is the curving route at the right edge of the frame. It continues beyond the tree but disappears before revealing its destination.

Together they form a composition that Colón understands differently in retrospect.

One element stands where it is.

The other leads somewhere that cannot yet be seen.

There is a difference between being alone and being lost.

I think I have understood that for much of my life without necessarily having words for it.

When I see a tree standing by itself, I don't automatically see loneliness.

I see something occupying its own place.

Perhaps that is why solitary trees have always attracted me.

There have been many periods of my life when I walked alone, waited alone, traveled alone, thought alone, and tried to understand what came next without anyone standing beside me with the answer.

The tree in this photograph does not know where the road goes.

Neither do I.

The road curves beyond what I can see, and that may be the part of the photograph that means the most to me now.

I know where I am.

I know what right now brings.

Tomorrow remains beyond the curve.

I don't know what waits there.

Neither does the tree.

It simply stands where it is.

For now, so do I.

Preserved as the fifty-first accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Standing Alone belongs to the Nature collection.

The photograph was made near Killeen, Texas, on December 24, 2017.

Its immediate subject is a solitary deciduous tree within a winter landscape. Remaining reddish foliage occupies its lower canopy while increasingly exposed branches rise against an expansive clouded sky. Fencing crosses the foreground, and a route at the right side of the composition curves beyond the visible landscape.

The work also contributes to two visual patterns identified through retrospective examination of Colón's archive.

One is his recurring attraction to solitary trees and isolated subjects.

The other is his repeated use of passages, roads, stairs, openings, and other routes whose destinations are partially or completely withheld from the viewer.

In Standing Alone, those tendencies occupy the same frame.

The autobiographical interpretation of the photograph developed after its creation and should not be understood as the photographer's conscious intention at the moment of capture.

Instead, the work demonstrates a recurring characteristic of Colón's observational practice: the camera sometimes records what attracts his attention years before he can fully articulate why.