'When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.' I find it hard to believe that I haven’t used that quote from Ansel Adams before!
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When I told people we were going to Mexico, a frequent piece of advice was, make sure you visit Oaxaca. It’s beautiful, they said, and the food is amazing! The advice however was unnecessary, as the city was already on my must-see list. And Oaxaca de Juárez, to give it its full name, definitely lived up to my expectations.
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The Torre dell'Elefante was built in 1307 when Cagliari was under Pisan rule. It takes its name from the small carving of an elephant on a ledge part way up.
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A bonus I didn’t expect when joining a local photography group was that one of the members would own a patch of woodland. A wood that at the moment is full not of picnicking bears but of bluebells and other early spring flowers.
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How does it feel to stand in the middle of a living geology lesson? To see for yourself the many ways the world’s surface has been shaped over the millennia into often fantastical shapes? Go to Iceland, and you will find out. There almost every view tells you something about the power of fire or water to carve, split or even destroy rock.
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I have a theory about penguins, which is that no one can watch one for any length of time without smiling. Certainly the truth of that theory was proved when we visited Antarctica and saw them for ourselves. Part of the appeal is that they walk upright, looking almost human. And they’re always so smartly dressed!
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In 1531 a peasant, Juan Diego, reported seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary on the hill of Tepeyac, today swallowed up in the metropolis of Mexico City. The Virgin, he said, spoke to him in in Nahuatl, his first language, asking that a church be built on the site in her honour.
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How do you feel about editing photos? Do you believe that the image you take should be the only one you present to the world? That it’s wrong to mess with the reality of what you saw? Or are you perhaps happy to tweak a shot a little, straightening a horizon or cropping out that person who wandered into it as you pressed the shutter?
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Sometimes a few words can enhance a viewer’s understanding of an image. After all, what else are captions for if not to explain?
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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.
