The Homage Remains

I came upon this mural during one of my walks through Sacromonte. Morente’s face caught me, but so did everything around it: the other marks on the wall, the cables crossing the painting, and the places where the plaster had worn away. I wanted to photograph it as part of the street, because that was how I encountered it.

At the time, I understood that someone had painted Morente out of respect for him. There is something generous about giving a person’s face to a neighborhood where others can pass it, recognize it, and remember. I stopped because I recognized that gesture.

The muralist was paying homage to a singer. By photographing the mural, I was paying homage to the muralist. I could not preserve the wall itself, but I could preserve the moment when I stood before it and saw what that artist had given to Granada.

Morente’s painted face occupies the center-right of the frame, its downward gaze drawing attention into the mural’s darker colors. A fragmentary orange figure on the neighboring wall gives the portrait a visual counterweight. Between them, exposed masonry, tags, and overlapping paint show how several hands and periods have shaped this surface.

Cables cross both the architecture and the image. A bright diagonal wall cuts across the lower foreground, establishing Colón’s position on the street rather than presenting the mural as a flat reproduction. The photograph keeps the tribute in its physical setting: a painted face exposed to daily life, alteration, and weather.

A song lives in the time it takes to sing it. When the voice stops, it can continue in the people who heard it, learned from it, or found a way to answer it. Morente’s voice moved El Niño de las Pinturas to make an image. Years later, that image stopped Colón in the street. Each person received something and carried it into a different art.

A wall offers no promise of permanence. Paint fades, plaster breaks, and new marks arrive beside the old ones. Yet its openness is part of the gift: the tribute can reach someone who did not come looking for it. Colón’s photograph holds one such encounter. It cannot keep the wall from changing, but it can remember what was there when he looked.

Perhaps a homage remains alive through that willingness to answer. A singer gives something to a painter; a painter leaves something for a passerby; a photographer makes room for the painter’s work to be seen again. None possesses the person being remembered. Each adds an act of attention to the memory.

The Homage Remains enters the Cities collection as a record of a specific street artwork in Sacromonte as it appeared in April 2014. The archive identifies Enrique Morente as its subject and El Niño de las Pinturas as the artist who painted the 2011 tribute.

Within the Photography Wing, the work preserves Colón’s encounter with another artist’s public memorial. Its value lies partly in what a later visit might no longer find: the particular arrangement of portrait, added marks, damaged plaster, cables, and neighboring walls visible on the day of the photograph. It also records Colón’s stated purpose in making the image—to honor the person who had honored Morente.