Blog Archives
a world behind the door
I can tell you right this minute that “faded beauty” is not always hyperbole: it is, in this case, exactly the right description.
Imagine if this place were freshly painted, if the stair railing were not half-way missing, if all those tiles on the wall matched. It wouldn’t be nearly as lovely, would it?
Havana, Cuba
photographed 11.6.2022
font angel
I love church statues. And if the statue is an angel, swooping down with a shell-shaped font? You know I’ll love that even more than a normal statue.
And then, when I get home, I have the pleasure of editing the image.
What a life!
Chiesa de San Giuseppe dei Padri Teatini
Palermo, Sicily
photographed 8.31.2022
madonna of the piazzetta
It is impossible to find the right words to convey how magical it was to walk the streets of these ancient towns, not really knowing where we were; new discoveries were at every turn. The light shifted. The narrow street widened into a piazza. Someone was feeding the stray cats. You could smell someone else’s lunch. Maybe there was a hint of a breeze. A motorbike went by, just inches away from walls, pedestrians. And, once, as the street turned into a piazzetta, a madonna observed all the happenings.
Caltabellotta, Sicily
photographed 9.5.2022
laundry minimalism
Over at the Valley of the Temples, I tried some minimalist shots, with mostly sky in the frame.
And then, a few days later, as we walked through the ancient mountain-top town of Caltabellotta*, I tried again, this time with laundry.
Caltabellotta, Sicily
photographed 9.5.2022
*It’s one of the oldest occupied towns in Sicily, with origins dating back 2000 years before Common Era. There’s evidence of Sicani, Greek, Arab, Norman, and Jewish heritage here.
temple minimalism
What a place this was – the Valley of the Temples, an array of 4th and 5th century BCE temples near the modern (and also ancient) Sicilian town of Agrigento. The temples were built by ancient Greeks, but were re-purposed over the centuries by Carthaginians and Romans; it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The temples play homage to the Greek gods and goddesses as well as the deities of subsequent cultures. (This site gives a good summary of the history of the ruins.)
It was breathtaking to stand among these ancient places and to think about all the people who found this particular location to be important – for sacred reasons or for strategic ones. It was hard to photograph. That much history is hard to capture through a lens, and anyway, it’s been photographed a billion times and who am I to think I could see anything any differently than what all the photographers who were there before me had already seen and photographed.
For reasons known only to my brain (and it’s not letting out any information on the matter), shooting some minimalist images of the place seemed like the thing I needed to do. And so I did.
Valley of the Temples
Agrigento, Sicily
photographed 9.2.2022
One Day | One Image 