Still Under Construction

I made this photograph on May 31, 2009.

At the time, I wasn't thinking about a photographic journey. I certainly wasn't looking at the cranes and thinking they represented anything about me.

I saw Santiago beneath the Andes and photographed it.

What impressed me was the scale. The city stretched across the foreground while the mountains seemed to rise behind everything. Between them were cranes and buildings still being constructed.

For years, that was simply what the photograph showed me.

Now, when I return to it, the cranes are what make me stop.

Santiago was changing. Buildings were unfinished. Parts of the skyline had not yet become what they would eventually become.

Neither had I.

There were parts of my own life that were still taking shape. I could not have known the people I would meet, the places I would travel, the photographs I would make, the music I would eventually write, or even that photography would become such an important way for me to understand and preserve my life.

None of that was in my mind when I pressed the shutter.

That distinction matters to me.

I don't believe I photographed the cranes because they represented my life. I photographed them because they were part of the city in front of me.

The meaning came later.

There are photographs whose meaning we understand when we make them.

And there are photographs we have to live long enough to understand.

I photographed a city being built at a time when I was still being built myself.

Still Under Construction predates the period Francisco Colón now identifies with the beginning of his photographic journey.

Made in Santiago in May 2009, the photograph presents three distinct scales of time within a single frame.

The Andes occupy the background as an immense geological presence. Santiago spreads beneath them on the human scale of streets, towers, and neighborhoods. Between those two worlds, construction cranes mark a city actively changing.

There is no evidence that Colón intended those cranes as personal symbolism when he made the photograph.

Their significance emerged retrospectively.

Returning to the image years later, he recognized a parallel between the unfinished skyline and his own position in 2009. The city had not yet become what it would become, and neither had the photographer.

That recognition places the photograph within an important thread running through the Francisco Colón Studio archive: meaning does not always originate at the moment of capture.

Sometimes the camera preserves something before the photographer has the experience necessary to understand why it matters.

It is easy to look backward and make the past seem more organized than it really was.

We know what happened next, so we begin seeing beginnings everywhere.

I don't want to do that with this photograph.

In 2009, I wasn't standing there thinking about transformation.

I wasn't thinking about becoming a photographer.

I wasn't thinking that those cranes represented me.

I was looking at Santiago and the Andes.

I made the photograph because the view made me look.

But the person looking at this photograph today knows things the person holding that Sony camera could not have known.

I know where photography eventually took me.

I know the journeys that came afterward.

I know the people who entered my life.

I know the things I created.

I know some of the things I lost.

And I know that I continued changing.

That is why the cranes affect me differently now.

They remind me that unfinished does not necessarily mean incomplete.

Sometimes unfinished simply means that construction is still underway.

The Santiago in this photograph continued becoming something else.

So did I.

Preserved as the fiftieth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Still Under Construction belongs to the Cities collection.

The photograph was made in Santiago, Chile, on May 31, 2009, before Colón identifies the beginning of his more deliberate photographic journey.

Its composition places the developing city beneath the monumental scale of the Andes. Construction cranes and unfinished towers provide visible evidence of Santiago at a particular stage in its continuing transformation.

The work's personal significance was recognized much later.

During a 2026 examination of his photographic archive, Colón recognized a parallel between the changing city preserved in the photograph and his own life at the time of its creation.

This interpretation is intentionally retrospective.

The cranes were not photographed as symbols of personal transformation. They became meaningful because the photographer eventually acquired something the original image could not contain:

knowledge of what came afterward.

Still Under Construction therefore functions both as a record of Santiago in 2009 and as an example of how photographic meaning can change without the photograph itself changing.

The city was still becoming.

The photographer was too.