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the modest maiden
One thing about aimless wandering through an unfamiliar city is that the history of the places you’ll wander past isn’t something you’re necessarily aware of.
Here’s an example – we found this fountain because we turned down a dark passageway and there it was.
I liked the modest maiden, so I made her photograph.
When I sat down to write this post, I looked up the location on a map and discovered it’s the Fontana Pretoria. Further research led me to this fascinating bit of knowledge: The fountain was originally built in 1544 in Florence, but was sold, transferred, and reassembled* in Palermo in 1574. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the fountain was considered to depict the corrupt municipality of Palermo. For this reason – and because of the nude statues, it became known as Piazza della Vergogna (or Square of Shame). In 1998 a five-year restoration project began.
So anyway, that maiden’s been modest now for nearly 480 years.
Fontana Pretoria
Palermo, Sicily
photographed 8.29.2022
*Mostly. Some parts of it went missing.
Bonus: Where it all started
I was eight years old.
This part of the story is seared into my memory. My dad and I took a walk up a trail from our campsite and he let me take a photo with his camera. I remember that he told me to compose the image with a rock in the foreground, to give it scale. So that’s what I did. All these years, I remembered the photo, with that rock, a valley, a distant mountain. I remembered that the rock was on the left side of the image.
Time passed.
Seven years ago, I cleaned out my dad’s house. I didn’t keep a lot of things, but I held on to a big box of slides. I was able, without much searching (because my dad was a reasonable good labeler) to find the slides from that summer vacation when I was eight. And there was MY photo – framed exactly like I remembered.
Today, one of my photographer friends’ Instagram post referenced a slide-scanning app called SlideScan. And you know what I did then.
And so, here I present the very first photo that I ever made, rock-for-scale and all.
near Twin Lakes, Colorado
photographed summer of 1964
One Day | One Image 