The Question I Still Ask

Some photographs begin long before the shutter is pressed.

In 1979, while living in Paterson, New Jersey, I was working the third shift at Passaic County Community College. On my way to work one evening, I noticed a man standing with a grocery cart filled with his belongings. He had a long beard, wore a hat, and was dressed in black.

The following night, knowing I might see him again, I brought an orange with me. When I encountered him, I offered it to him.

He simply said, "No, thank you."

What stayed with me was not that he refused the orange. It was the clarity of those words. I found myself wondering who he was, what his life had been, what he knew, and what circumstances had brought him to that place.

I never learned the answer.

Decades later, whenever I encounter someone whose circumstances leave me wondering about the life behind what I can see, that memory returns.

In Mexico City, I encountered this person sitting beside a storefront, knees drawn inward and hands clasped together. A large red umbrella occupied much of the space in front of them.

I did not know who this person was.

I did not know what had happened before I arrived.

And once again, I found myself asking the same question.

The red umbrella establishes the photograph's visual hierarchy before the human figure is fully discovered. Its saturated color, scale, and diagonal form command the foreground, while the seated person occupies a comparatively narrow space along the right side of the composition.

That imbalance is central to the image.

The umbrella functions simultaneously as an object, a barrier, and a form of shelter. Behind it, polished woodwork, glass, patterned windows, and a light-colored floor suggest an ordered commercial environment. Beside it, the figure folds inward, head lowered and hands clasped around the knees.

The photograph provides no reliable explanation for the person's circumstances. Their identity, destination, history, and reason for being there remain outside the frame.

Rather than supplying those answers, The Question I Still Ask makes uncertainty itself part of the work. The photograph records what was visible while allowing the unknown life of the person within it to remain unknown.

There are people we encounter for only a few seconds who remain with us for the rest of our lives.

I never knew the name of the man I met in Paterson in 1979. I never knew where he came from, what he had lost, what he had accomplished, whom he loved, what he knew, or how he arrived at that particular place in his life.

Nearly four decades later, in Mexico City, I found myself looking through a camera at another person whose story I did not know.

The cities were different.

The years were different.

Their circumstances may have been completely different.

But the question was the same.

Who were you before I found you here?

Photography cannot answer that question. A photograph records only the fraction of a second in which our lives happen to cross.

Everything before that moment belongs to the person.

Perhaps the responsibility of the photograph is not to explain them, but to remind us that there is something to explain—that every stranger we encounter was already living an entire life before we arrived.

It is the question I still ask.

The Question I Still Ask enters the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing as a study of observation, uncertainty, and the limits of what a photograph can establish about another person's life.

The work is connected to an encounter the artist remembers from Paterson, New Jersey, in 1979. Nearly four decades separate that memory from the photograph made in Mexico City, yet both encounters produced the same unresolved curiosity about the life of a stranger.

Within People & Daily Life, the photograph extends the collection's recurring interest in individuals encountered briefly in public spaces. Like other works in the collection, it distinguishes between what the camera records and what the photographer can responsibly claim to know.

The person's circumstances are therefore deliberately left undefined. The archive preserves the visible evidence—the posture, surroundings, umbrella, storefront, and moment of encounter—while the title preserves the question that arose from seeing them.