Where the Ocean Speaks

This photograph was created along the coastline of Quebradillas in September 2014.

I stood facing the Atlantic while wave after wave struck the rocks.

I may have made fifty photographs, perhaps more.

Many were good.

The hardest task was eliminating the good ones that were not the one.

I liked this image because of the suspended drops and the exact shape of the splash.

I had timed each exposure, but this particular wave was better than all the others.

I knew I would never receive a second take of this splash, not in a billion years.

At some point, enough had to be enough.

But before leaving, I believed the right moment would come.

I only needed to allow it to come to me.

Looking back, I realize I was not photographing a wave.

I was photographing a moment the ocean itself would never see again.

Nature is cyclical, but individual moments within those cycles are never repeated.

Where the Ocean Speaks records one wave among countless others.

The work celebrates patient recognition rather than control.

The artist could not create the splash.

He could only remain present until the sea offered the moment he had been waiting to receive.

During a September 2014 visit to the coast of Quebradillas, the artist made dozens of RAW exposures as waves struck the shoreline.

The challenge was not producing a successful photograph, but identifying the one whose suspended spray, cloud formation, light, and timing felt complete.

This image became the chosen frame because the splash could never recur in precisely the same form.

The ocean teaches the same lesson every day.

Wait.

Watch.

Do not hurry what cannot be hurried.

Most waves are forgotten before they reach the shore.

One asks to be remembered.

Perhaps patience is learning to recognize the extraordinary when it arrives.

Preserved as the thirty-third accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Where the Ocean Speaks completes an important group of Puerto Rican coastal works through its focus on patience, impermanence, and the singularity of natural events.