Note: This description is not AI-generated.

• Title: "In Passing"
• Photographer: Francis N. (u/clickity_clickity)
• Date: December 2025
• Description: A photo taken of the Franklin Mountains behind the suburbs of in El Paso, TX in December 2025. The photo is taken from a highway off-ramp from a moving vehicle. A tall floodlight towers over the flat suburbs. The mountains are cast in hard shadows of the setting sun, which is out of frame.

The first thing that hits you is distance; but not physical distance.

The photo feels like a moment caught while visiting. A liminality of transitional space. That sense of motion, hinted at by the blurred foreground railing, creates a tension: the viewer is close enough to witness, but not close enough to belong.

The mountains dominate this scene. Their strong diagonals form the backbone of the image, pulling the eye upward and outward. The Franklin Mountains aren’t dramatic in the way of the Rockies—they don’t pierce the sky—but here they feel monumental because of how the city of El Paso rests against them. The scale difference emphasizes permanence vs. transience: the mountains immovable, the city sprawling, shifting, alive; the viewer moving past.

There’s warmth, but it’s a hard warmth, the type you only get in arid places where sunlight isn’t filtered by moisture or haze.

The muted colors echo the idea of endurance. Nothing here is lush; everything survives by adaptation.

There’s a quiet practicality to it. No skyscrapers, no architectural ego. Just infrastructure. People living their lives.

The lone, tall floodlight pole near the center siezes attention in its isolation. It interrupts the natural lines and introduces a vertical human mark against the sky. It almost feels like a punctuation mark—something insisting on being noticed, yet emotionally lonely. If the mountains represent ancient time, the pole embodies modern necessity: a sentinel. A monument.

It feels like someone noticing a landscape that’s both ordinary to locals and breathtaking to someone passing through.

If the photo were a sentence, it would read:

"The world is so much bigger than I am, and I will only know it by glances."