The Waiting Room

This photograph was made at a Sheraton hotel in the Bahamas during one of my business trips.

My flight back to Florida was not until later that afternoon, so I ordered breakfast from room service and spent the morning in my room.

This was normal for me.

When I traveled for business, I often preferred working from the hotel rather than immediately going out. I would answer emails, return phone calls, speak with customers, and begin arranging whatever trip might come next.

Looking at this photograph now, however, I don't really see the Bahamas.

I see all the rooms.

Argentina. Chile. Mexico. Colombia. Ecuador. Costa Rica. Brazil. The Bahamas. London. Spain. France. Italy.

Different hotels. Different cities. Different countries.

But often the same rhythm.

There were the customers and the meetings that explained why I was traveling. There were emails to answer and flights to arrange.

And beneath all of that was another part of my life.

There was also her.

Sometimes I was waiting to see her.

Sometimes I was thinking about when I would see her again.

And on the final day of almost every trip, there was another kind of waiting—the quiet period between everything that had happened and the flight that would take me away again.

This particular morning happened in the Bahamas.

But the room could have been almost anywhere.

The Waiting Room transforms an ordinary hotel-room photograph into a visual record of repetition.

Nothing within the frame identifies an extraordinary event. Room-service breakfast rests on the table. The photographer's feet are elevated in front of him. A bag occupies a nearby chair. Daylight enters through a window whose exterior reveals almost nothing about the country beyond it.

That anonymity is essential to the work.

Although the photograph was physically created in the Bahamas, the room functions as a surrogate for hotel rooms encountered throughout years of international business travel.

Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Brazil, London, Spain, France, Italy and other destinations formed the geography of those years. Hotel rooms formed their private interior.

Within those spaces, professional obligations and personal anticipation existed together.

The Waiting Room therefore belongs not simply to a particular destination, but to the intervals between destinations—the hours spent working, remembering, anticipating, and preparing to leave again.

Some of the places that define our lives are places we never intended to remember.

A hotel room is designed to be temporary.

Someone occupies it tonight.

Someone else occupies it tomorrow.

The bed is remade.

The breakfast tray disappears.

The suitcase leaves.

Eventually, almost nothing remains to prove that a particular life briefly existed there.

Yet when travel becomes part of your life, these temporary rooms begin to resemble one another.

They become places between places.

You arrive carrying what happened before.

You leave carrying what happened there.

And in between, you wait.

For a meeting.

For a telephone call.

For someone.

For the next flight.

For another country.

For another return.

Perhaps that is why this photograph no longer feels to me like a picture of a hotel room in the Bahamas.

It feels like every room.

Every trip.

Every departure.

And all the waiting in between.

Preserved as the thirty-eighth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, The Waiting Room documents the private rhythm underlying a period of extensive international business travel.

Although created at a Sheraton hotel in the Bahamas, the photograph is interpreted within the Journeys collection as representative of hotel stays across multiple countries, including Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Brazil and other European destinations.

The work also forms a visual connection to the autobiographical experiences that later informed the album Fronteras y Ecos.

Rather than depicting travel through landmarks, aircraft, or recognizable destinations, The Waiting Room turns inward. It documents the temporary spaces between journeys, where professional obligations, personal anticipation, solitude, and departure repeatedly intersected.

The unidentified exterior beyond the bright hotel window reinforces the work's broader meaning: the specific destination becomes secondary to the recurring experience of being between arrival and departure.