Where My Journey Began — 1492

I prepared carefully for this photograph.

The previous day, I had spent the entire day inside the Alhambra.

I later found the Mirador de San Nicolás, the courtyard before the church overlooking the palace across the valley.

I arrived approximately an hour before sunset to find a position and wait for the light, knowing many others would gather for the same view.

This panorama was created from multiple photographs meticulously stitched together.

There are thousands of images of the Alhambra.

This one is special to me because I was there.

I shared the evening air, sunlight, humidity, clouds, and history of that place.

The history of the Alhambra is part of Granada.

The history of Granada is part of Spain.

The events associated with 1492 connected Spain to the Americas and ultimately to my own history.

Standing there, I felt as though I had arrived somewhere my soul already remembered.

I still believe I was there before I got there.

Where My Journey Began — 1492 transforms a celebrated monument into a personal act of witnessing.

The panorama does not claim to be the definitive view of the Alhambra.

Its significance lies in presence: one traveler standing beneath one sky at one unrepeatable moment while recognizing that history has already connected him to the place.

Curatorially, Where My Journey Began — 1492 is strongest when read through thresholds and first movements. 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 beginnings through form as well as through biography, giving the work an independent visual life while remaining connected to the artist’s experience.

Every generation inherits history.

We visit monuments believing we have come to see them.

Sometimes they have been waiting to see us.

We leave with photographs, memories, and questions we did not bring.

Perhaps history does not only tell us where we came from.

Perhaps it reminds us that we have always belonged to a story larger than ourselves.

The photograph ultimately raises a question about the tension between what is known and what has not yet happened. A camera can hold the appearance of a moment, but it cannot hold the entire experience surrounding it. That limitation gives Where My Journey Began — 1492 much of its power. What is absent is not a flaw to be repaired; it is the space in which memory continues to work. The image remains fixed while the person returning to it does not.

Preserved as the thirty-second accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Where My Journey Began — 1492 serves as a signature work of the Journeys collection and as the cover image for Curated Paths.

The panorama connects personal presence, historical consciousness, and the transatlantic origins of the artist's larger story.

Within the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Where My Journey Began — 1492 is retained as part of the archive as a record of beginnings whose consequences were not visible at the time. Its importance is therefore not measured only by subject matter or visual appeal. The work helps establish a recurring Studio principle: personal history can be preserved with emotional depth while the archive remains disciplined about the difference between what the photograph shows, what the artist remembers, and what later interpretation can responsibly infer.