The Beginning of Paradise

This was near the beginning of my journey into Granada, and I remember feeling really good that morning.

I was standing beneath this stone arch looking toward the steps ahead of me. The morning light was beginning to come through, creating these alternating areas of light and shadow across the staircase. Beyond them was all that greenery.

There was something about it that made me feel calm.

I was in another country, walking through a city that I was there to discover, but at that moment it didn't feel unfamiliar. It felt almost like familiar territory. I wasn't apprehensive about where the path was taking me. I wanted to keep walking.

Looking through the arch and seeing the light, the shadows, the trees and those steps rising in front of me, I had this feeling that I was about to walk into paradise.

That is what I remember about making this photograph.

The photograph is constructed around a natural frame within the architecture. The heavy stone passage occupies much of the image, enclosing a smaller illuminated world beyond it.

Rather than eliminating the darkness of the foreground structure, the composition uses it to concentrate attention on the staircase. The curved arch establishes the first boundary; beyond it, repeated horizontal bands of illuminated and shadowed stone create a visual rhythm that carries the eye progressively upward.

A vertical shadow extending through the foreground pavement provides another directional element, leading toward the center of the stairs. Green vegetation softens the surrounding masonry and introduces an organic counterpoint to the geometry of the architecture.

The photograph depends upon the relationship between enclosure and openness. Neither is presented as threatening. The darkness establishes the threshold; the light beyond provides the invitation.

Beginnings do not always announce themselves.

Sometimes they are simply a threshold: a darkened passage, a staircase, a patch of morning light and the decision to continue walking.

The darkness in this photograph does not oppose the light. It makes the light perceptible. One gives shape to the other. The path ahead is similarly incomplete; we can see where it begins and the direction in which it rises, but not where it ultimately leads.

Perhaps that uncertainty is part of what makes a beginning possible.

There are places we encounter for the first time that nevertheless produce the strange comfort of recognition. We cannot always explain why a foreign street, landscape or quality of light feels familiar. For a moment, geography becomes less important than belonging.

Paradise, in that sense, need not be a destination.

Sometimes it begins with the feeling that we are exactly where we want to be and the willingness to take the next step.

The Beginning of Paradise is preserved within the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing as part of the collection's continuing examination of journeys, thresholds and the emotional experience of place.

The photograph is significant not because the precise architectural structure has been identified, but because it records an early moment in Colón's experience of Granada. The Studio deliberately retains the broader location rather than assigning an unsupported identification to the archway.

Within the collection, the image also demonstrates Colón's recurring attention to passages, openings, paths and spaces that suggest movement beyond the visible frame. Here, architecture does not function simply as subject matter. The arch establishes a boundary between two spaces, while the staircase provides the means of continuing from one into the other.

The work is preserved as a photograph of beginning: not merely the beginning of a walk through Granada, but the moment when an unfamiliar place began to feel welcoming.