Waiting for Green

This photograph was taken from the passenger seat of a taxi on July 22, 2009, the same day as The Shadow I Left Behind.

I do not remember exactly where I was coming from or where I was going.

What remained was the experience of sitting quietly inside the taxi while the city continued around me.

Through the windshield, Buenos Aires appeared in fragments: the red traffic light, buildings at the intersection, vehicles ahead, and the limited evening light.

Inside the taxi, another world existed.

The dashboard, mirrors, reflections, hanging objects, and windshield framed everything beyond them.

The taxi ride was one journey.

The interior space offered another.

Looking back, I realize I was not photographing the street ahead.

I was photographing the experience of moving through it.

Waiting for Green turns transportation into temporary architecture.

The taxi becomes a small room traveling through a larger city, allowing interior objects and the exterior street to occupy the same visual field.

The red light pauses physical movement, but observation continues.

The work suggests that journeys are shaped not only by destinations, but by the enclosed and transitional spaces through which we pass.

Created during a taxi ride through Buenos Aires, this photograph records a moment whose route has been forgotten but whose atmosphere remains.

The city appears beyond the windshield while the objects inside the taxi become part of the landscape.

Only later did the artist recognize that the photograph had been made on the same day as The Shadow I Left Behind.

Together, the two works form an unplanned pair: one looking inward toward identity, the other looking outward through the moving world.

Every journey is remembered by its destinations.

Yet our lives are often changed somewhere in between.

At a red light.

Inside a taxi.

Looking through a windshield.

Waiting, without realizing that waiting is part of the journey itself.

Sometimes the destination teaches us something.

Sometimes the road does.

Preserved as the twentieth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Waiting for Green explores the temporary spaces between departure and arrival.

Its shared capture date with The Shadow I Left Behind creates an important dialogue between inner reflection and outward movement.