The Staircase Between Meetings

I was in Cartagena on a business trip and attending a meeting at a hotel whose name I can no longer recall.

When we stopped for lunch, I took my camera with me and began walking through the building.

I was not searching for a particular subject. I was simply using the break to look around.

That was when I came across this staircase.

From the upper landing, the blue railings appeared to circle through the pale stone while the yellow columns crossed the composition and interrupted its symmetry.

The staircase was functional, but from where I stood, it no longer looked ordinary.

It seemed to reorganize itself into a series of curves, repeated lines, and descending levels that drew my attention toward the dark opening at its center.

I stopped and made the photograph.

The name of the hotel has disappeared from my memory, but the staircase has not.

It remains connected to that brief space between meetings when I stepped away from the responsibilities of the day and found something unexpected waiting inside the architecture.

Curatorially, The Staircase Between Meetings is strongest when read through the discipline of noticing what might otherwise pass without emphasis. The composition does not require a dramatic event to justify its place in the collection; its meaning develops through relationships inside the frame—distance, scale, structure, atmosphere, and the distribution of visual weight. That restraint is important. It allows the photograph to carry the theme of observation through form as well as through biography, giving the work an independent visual life while remaining connected to the artist’s experience.

I cannot remember the name of the hotel.

I remember being in Cartagena for business. I remember the meeting, the lunch break, and taking my camera with me as I walked through the building.

Most of the practical details surrounding that day have faded.

The staircase remained.

Perhaps that is because I did not experience it merely as a way of moving between floors.

From above, the railings became circles. The steps became repeating lines. The columns crossed through the pattern and prevented the architecture from becoming perfectly symmetrical.

Everything appeared to lead downward toward a center whose depth was difficult to determine.

For a few minutes, the purpose of the business trip gave way to the act of seeing.

I was no longer thinking about the meeting.

I was looking at shape, color, repetition, and the way a familiar structure could become unfamiliar when viewed from the right position.

The hotel may be absent from my memory, but this overlooked part of it became permanent.

That is one of the things photography preserves—not always the complete history of a place, but the exact fragment that made us stop.

Preserved as the sixty-second accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, The Staircase Between Meetings joins the Cities collection as a study of architecture, observation, memory, and visual transformation.

The photograph was created inside an unidentified hotel in Cartagena, Colombia, on November 12, 2015.

Colón was visiting Cartagena on business and attending a meeting at the hotel. During a lunch break, he carried his camera while walking through the building and encountered the staircase from an upper landing.

The identity of the hotel cannot presently be confirmed. The Studio record therefore preserves the location honestly as an unidentified hotel in Cartagena rather than attributing the photograph to a specific property without supporting documentation.

The camera recorded the image at 11:48:15 AM.

Colón used a Canon EOS 5D Mark III and a Canon EF 28–135mm f/3.5–5.6 IS USM lens at a focal length of 30mm. The image was recorded at ISO 160 with evaluative metering, automatic white balance, and no flash.

The composition is structured by the repeated circular movement of the blue railings, the radiating pattern of the stone steps, and the diagonal interruption created by the yellow columns.

These elements direct the viewer from the exterior edges of the frame toward the shadowed center of the staircase.

Within the Studio archive, the work represents the persistence of photographic observation beyond formally planned excursions.

The image was not created during a scheduled photographic assignment. It emerged during a temporary pause in a business day, demonstrating how attentive observation can transform an ordinary architectural feature into a lasting visual record.

The forgotten identity of the hotel also contributes to the work's relationship with memory. The broader setting has faded, while the staircase encountered within it remains visible and specific.