One frame left. Our bus stopped for a second, engine still running, and there it was, a mototaxi idling, a yellow taxi rolling past, "Bodega Don Victor" painted under a Coca-Cola mural the size of the building. Wires scrawled across a hazy sky.

I didn't think. Old compact Olympus, out the bus window, one press. No burst mode, no checking the screen with film, no time, you commit and wait weeks to find out if you were right.

Nothing "happens" in this photo. It's just a street corner. Don't ask me why that specific corner did it and not the hundred corners before it; it just did.

And yet, twenty years later, it still gives me goosebumps, because none of it existed for my benefit. Someone built that sign by hand. Someone drives that mototaxi for a living. Who or what was Don Victor.
A hundred private stories I'd never know, crammed into one street corner.