What Stood in the Way

I went to the waterfront early that morning simply looking for photographs.

I was not there because of the yachts.

I am not a boat person, and luxury yachts have never held any particular fascination for me. I can appreciate their scale, engineering, and appearance, but the lifestyle they represent was not what made me raise the camera.

What caught my attention was the morning behind them.

The sky was extraordinary. Heavy clouds filled with violet and pink were beginning to separate as the first light of the day broke through them. It was the kind of sky that makes me stop because I know it will exist in exactly that form for only a few moments.

Then there was this yacht.

It was enormous, brightly illuminated, polished, and impossible to ignore.

And it was standing directly in the way of the view I wanted to photograph.

So I photographed both.

That is what makes this image interesting to me now. Anyone looking at it might reasonably believe the yacht was the subject. Visually, it demands attention.

But it never was.

The yacht was what stood in the way of the photograph I had gone there hoping to find.

What Stood in the Way deliberately allows its most visually dominant object to function as a false subject.

The yacht occupies much of the lower frame. Its size, illuminated decks, polished white hull, and sharply defined bow naturally attract attention. Under ordinary circumstances, these elements would identify the vessel as the unquestioned subject of the photograph.

The expansive sky complicates that reading.

Violet and pink clouds occupy the majority of the composition, their scale overwhelming even a vessel designed to appear imposing. Breaking morning light along the left side of the frame introduces a natural event that is temporary, uncontrolled, and vastly larger than the structure beneath it.

The photograph therefore establishes a visual conversation between two forms of spectacle.

One was manufactured.

The other was simply happening.

The title redirects the viewer toward the photographer's original intention. The yacht is not diminished or criticized; its visual magnificence remains part of the photograph. But within the artist's experience, it was an obstacle positioned between the camera and the atmosphere that had actually commanded his attention.

Sometimes what stands in our way becomes part of what we remember.

I could have looked at this yacht and decided that the photograph I wanted was unavailable.

The sky was behind it.

The view was interrupted.

The foreground was occupied by something I had not gone there to photograph.

Instead, I accepted what was there.

Looking at the image now, I find something almost humorous in the difference between what the photograph appears to celebrate and what actually caused me to make it.

The yacht looks important.

It is enormous, expensive, beautifully designed, and illuminated against the morning.

Yet my eyes were somewhere else.

I was looking at clouds changing color.

I was watching the darkness give way to morning.

I was trying to preserve something that would disappear within minutes.

Perhaps photography sometimes works that way.

We begin by looking beyond an obstacle and eventually discover that the obstacle belongs in the story.

The yacht stood in my way.

So I made it part of the photograph.

What Stood in the Way enters the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing as a study of visual hierarchy, intention, and the difference between an apparent subject and the photographer's actual reason for making an image.

Created at the West Palm Beach waterfront during the early morning of September 28, 2014, the photograph places a large illuminated yacht beneath an expansive field of violet and pink clouds.

Although the vessel dominates the foreground, the artist's account establishes that the changing sky was the element that initially attracted his attention. The yacht became part of the composition because it occupied the space between the photographer and the atmospheric event beyond it.

Within the Nature collection, the work examines the relationship between human construction and natural scale without assigning a moral judgment to either.

Its place in the Studio rests instead on a recurring principle within Colón's photography: what first appears to be the subject of a photograph is not always what caused the photographer to stop and look.