Cities
The Heart of Buenos Aires
An elevated view across Buenos Aires becomes a meditation on place, memory, and the city where a life-changing story quietly began.
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Returning to a place does not return us to the person we once were. The landscape may remain familiar, but time, memory, and experience change the way we encounter it.
The photographs in this exhibition explore return as an act of remembrance, gratitude, and recognition. They consider why certain cities, landscapes, and memories continue to call us back.
The Exhibition
Featured Works
Reflections
The Keeper of Paris
A silent statue overlooking Paris becomes the visible guardian of a memory whose most important presence remained just outside the frame.
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The Scarlet Canopy
A flamboyant tree overlooking the Puerto Rican countryside becomes a meditation on family, inheritance, memory, and home.
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Nature
Beyond the Horizon
A sweeping view of Puerto Rico's northern coast preserves a beautiful September day and the quiet anticipation of continuing west toward family in Aguada.
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Cities
The Last Night
Quito appears through a hotel window after sunset, layered with mountain silhouettes, gathering clouds, city lights, and the quiet emotion of a traveler preparing to leave.
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Journeys
The Waiting Room
A quiet morning in a hotel room in the Bahamas becomes a record of a ritual repeated across years of international travel—room service, work, phone calls, waiting, and eventually another departure.
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Cities
The Other Colón
Teatro Colón stands along the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina, photographed on August 8, 2015. Its symmetrical façade and elaborate architectural details rise above the everyday movement of the city. Photographed as part of a familiar walk through Buenos Aires, the image preserves the theater within its urban surroundings, including pedestrians, traffic signals, and the nearby Avenida 9 de Julio. The photograph also carries a personal connection for the photographer: the theater and Francisco Colón share the same name.
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Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing
Where She First Walked
A hillside community rises above the shoreline of Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, photographed from the water shortly after the artist and his family gathered at sea to spread his mother's ashes. Somewhere among these homes is the place where she spent part of her earliest childhood, connecting the landscape of her beginnings with the family's return generations later.
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Journeys
A Passage by Liberty
A sailboat crosses New York Harbor in silhouette as the Statue of Liberty rises beyond it against the last color of the evening sky. Francisco Colón made the photograph on September 6, 2015, during a boat outing with his daughter—a return to a landmark he had first studied closely while drawing it for his seventh-grade art teacher in the bicentennial year of 1976.
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Photography Wing
Where Our Histories Meet
Where Our Histories Meet portrays the Russian Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, Germany, photographed during a 2014 return to a city deeply connected to Francisco Colón's family history. Colón first encountered the chapel while stationed in Darmstadt with the U.S. Army and later brought his wife there; decades afterward, he returned with their daughter, who was born in nearby Frankfurt. Built for Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family during their visits to Darmstadt, the chapel brought together personal memory, family, history, and the quiet weight of return.
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Cities
Along the Rhine, Together
Sooneck Castle rises above the wooded hillside near Niederheimbach along the Rhine River in Germany. Photographed from a river cruise in 2014, the castle was one of several encountered during a journey Francisco Colón had wanted to make for many years. The cruise became part of a return to Germany with his daughter, where they revisited the country in which she was born while also experiencing something neither of them had done before.
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Reflections
The Car That Takes Me Back
A yellow Volkswagen Beetle parked along a street in Old San Juan became an immediate connection to another time in Francisco Colón's life. Colón had owned two Volkswagen Beetles, beginning with his first car at Fort Knox in 1983 and followed by a 1973 Beetle while living in Darmstadt, Germany. That second car became part of the story surrounding the birth of his daughter. Encountering another Beetle decades later in Puerto Rico brought those memories immediately back.
View the photograph →Curator's Reflection
We sometimes return hoping to find what was left behind. Instead, we often discover how much has changed within us.
The most meaningful returns do not recreate the past. They allow us to honor it, understand it, and continue forward carrying its meaning.