The Tools of His Trade

Early that morning in Mexico City, I saw this man pushing his cart along the street.

What caught my attention was not simply that he was working.

It was his tools.

There were eight different types of brooms rising from that cart.

A carpenter has his tools. A plumber has his tools. A mechanic has his tools. A mason has his tools.

And this man had his.

Someone passing him on the street might simply see a collection of brooms. I saw something different. I saw the equipment of someone prepared to do a particular job.

That made me think about craftsmanship and the way we sometimes assign importance to one kind of work while barely noticing another.

I do not know his name. I never saw his face. I cannot tell you what he thought about his work or how he felt about it.

But I can tell you what I saw.

I saw a man early in the morning, moving through Mexico City with the tools he needed to take care of his part of it.

That was enough to make me stop.

The Tools of His Trade centers a municipal worker moving away from the photographer along a pedestrian walkway in Mexico City.

The worker's bright yellow and magenta uniform establishes the primary visual anchor against the surrounding greens and neutral pavement. Above him, eight brooms of differing forms, materials, colors, and dimensions rise from the cart and become the photograph's defining visual detail.

Colón's attention was specifically drawn to this variety. Rather than treating the brooms as incidental equipment, he recognized them as specialized tools associated with the worker's occupation.

A second pedestrian appears along the right side of the composition. Although not part of Colón's original reason for making the photograph, the figure provides a later visual relationship: one person maintains the public environment while another moves through it.

The photograph does not establish the worker's feelings toward his occupation. Ideas of professionalism, craftsmanship, and pride belong to Colón's interpretation of what he observed in the worker's preparation and equipment rather than to any documented statement by the subject.

Looking at this photograph now, I still return to the brooms.

Eight of them.

Different shapes. Different sizes. Different materials. Different tools for different jobs.

That was what made me stop then, and it is still what holds my attention now.

There are occupations whose tools we immediately recognize as signs of skill. We see a mechanic's toolbox, a carpenter's tools, or a mason's equipment and understand that different tasks require different instruments.

Here, the tools happen to be brooms.

The photograph reminds me that craftsmanship does not depend upon how important someone else considers the occupation.

I cannot know whether this man thought about his work in those terms.

I only know that when I saw him that morning, I did.

Behind him, another person continues along the walkway.

The city is beginning its day.

And before many of those people move through these streets, someone is already there taking care of them.

Preserved as the one hundred forty-fifth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, The Tools of His Trade was made in Mexico City, Mexico, on October 20, 2018.

The photograph records a municipal worker transporting cleaning equipment along a pedestrian walkway during the morning hours.

The central visual element is the collection of eight brooms carried on the worker's cart. Their differing forms prompted Colón to view them not merely as cleaning implements but as the specialized tools of a trade.

The photograph was made immediately before FCS-PH-0144, At 7:51 That Morning. Camera metadata places the two exposures forty-nine seconds apart, establishing them as consecutive observations from the same morning walk.

Together, the photographs demonstrate Colón's observational approach during his time in Mexico City: one photograph directed toward an individual and the details of his work, followed moments later by an architectural observation of the city around him.