Dereliction and decay are natural subjects for black and white photography. The lack of colour adds to a sense of aging, perhaps because we associate it with the photos taken by past generations. Also, the textures of decay stand out more when colour is subtracted.
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Sitting on the plane that brought us home from Mexico we were congratulating ourselves on our timing. Tomorrow would be the first of March, and spring, we thought, just around the corner. We should have known better! Although in the fairly recent past (most notably the lockdown spring of 2020) we’ve had some wonderful March weather, this time last year I was writing that, ‘With a slow start to the spring this year it’s felt at times as if March was coming in more like a polar bear than a lion!’ And so it was again this year.
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It is hard to resist the lure of flowing water. The movement and sound together seem to draw us like a magnet. As you approach a beach and hear the waves crashing on the shore, or follow a forest trail towards the sound of a waterfall, I bet you quicken your steps? I know I do!
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When Samuel Morse invented the Morse Code he wanted to assign the simplest codes to the most frequently used letters. To work out what those were he counted the number of letters in sets of printers' type. He found that the most commonly used letter was E, followed by T, then A.
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Some ten kilometres or so south of the centre of Mexico City lies historic Villa Coyoacán. Today it is a picturesque corner of the wider conurbation but was once a village in its own right. It was founded by the Tepecana people on the shores of Lake Texcoco, a huge lake now largely drained, its area occupied by Mexico City.
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In the remote mountainous lands of Chihuahua state in northern Mexico the Rarámuri people of the Copper Canyon still enjoy a largely traditional lifestyle, despite the incursions of the modern world. We were privileged to be able to meet a Rarámuri family, one that has chosen to blend a traditional way of life with the benefits that tourism can offer.
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The Sea of Cortez is considered one of the most diverse seas on earth, home to more than 5,000 species of micro-invertebrates. And where there are micro-invertebrates there are bigger animals too – sometimes much bigger. Blue whales come here to mate and calve each spring, while many other whale species are also to be seen, either seasonally or, in the case of fin and sperm whales, year-round.
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A black and white world is a strange world indeed, but then there is much in the world that seems strange to us. Different cultures, different landscapes, different architecture, different animals … and that is why we travel.
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Long before the Aztecs set foot in what is today Mexico, another people built their city there, creating one of the first urban societies in the Americas. But little is known about these people. When the Aztecs arrived the city was already abandoned. Yet the new arrivals were so impressed by what they found that they named it Teotihuacan, 'the place where the gods were created'.
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Desmond Morris famously said that, ‘The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo’. Yes, the people make the city, but when it comes to appreciating a city as a whole, rather than its individual streets and buildings (some of which may be beautiful, others less so), nothing beats getting up high.
