Still Looking Up

I don't remember taking this particular photograph.

But I remember looking at clouds.

I've been doing that for most of my life.

When I was a boy in the 1960s, I would sometimes accompany my mother to the bingo hall. I would get bored sitting inside listening to the numbers being called, so I would go outside and find something to do.

There was a parking lot with a chain stretched between posts. I would use it like a swing. Sometimes I would hang upside down from it and look at the sky.

I became fascinated by the clouds.

As I grew older, that never really went away.

I still stop and look at cloud formations. Sometimes I search their shapes for familiar objects. Sometimes it is simply the light, the colors, or the way one cloud separates from another that catches my attention.

That is what I like about this photograph.

I like the separation of the clouds and the gradual transition between the lighter blues and the deeper blues of the sky.

I cannot tell you exactly where I was when I made it, and I do not remember pressing the shutter.

That does not mean I dismissed the moment.

I have had countless moments like this throughout my life.

Most of them happened without a camera.

This time, I happened to have one.

And all these years later, I'm still looking up.

Still Looking Up presents a cloud study photographed over Merritt Island, Florida, on May 16, 2018.

The composition contains no horizon, architecture, landscape, or human figure. Clouds and atmosphere occupy the entire frame.

A large central formation provides the principal visual mass while smaller formations remain separated throughout the surrounding sky. Variations in illumination give the clouds depth and volume, while the background transitions gradually from softer, lighter blues toward deeper tones.

For Colón, these visual characteristics were sufficient reason to photograph the scene. His attention to clouds, however, predates his photography by decades.

As a child, he developed the habit of watching clouds while waiting for his mother during visits to a bingo hall. That childhood fascination continued into adulthood, often without a camera present.

The significance of Still Looking Up therefore lies not in the uniqueness of the particular event, which Colón does not remember, but in its documentation of a recurring way of seeing that began long before this photograph was made.

Not every photograph preserves a moment I remember.

Sometimes a photograph preserves something I have done so many times that the individual moment disappears among all the others.

I do not remember where I was standing when I made this photograph.

I do not remember raising the camera.

But I know why clouds could make me do it.

I have been looking at them since I was a boy.

Back then I did not have a camera. I simply looked.

I watched their shapes change. I searched for familiar things inside them. I noticed the light and the different shades of blue surrounding them.

Decades later, I still do.

There are probably thousands of skies I have stopped to look at that exist only in my memory, if they remain there at all.

This one happened to become a photograph.

The moment may be forgotten.

The habit of looking remains.

Preserved as the one hundred forty-ninth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Still Looking Up was made on Merritt Island, Florida, on May 16, 2018.

Colón does not retain a specific memory of making the photograph or of the exact location from which it was made. The Merritt Island location is retained from his reconstruction of his whereabouts on the recorded date rather than from a specific recollection of the photographic moment.

The work is connected to a recurring visual interest that began during Colón's childhood in the 1960s. While accompanying his mother to a bingo hall, he would sometimes leave the hall and occupy himself outside, including playing on a chain stretched between posts in the parking lot. He remembers looking at cloud formations during those periods and becoming fascinated by their changing shapes.

That practice of looking continued throughout his adult life, usually without being photographed.

Within the Studio collection, Still Looking Up therefore documents not an exceptional event but a persistent act of observation: one recorded instance from a lifetime of looking at the sky.