Shadows like a black hug. Deep, inky shadows… traveling the surfaces of the rock in curves and lines… biting it as a lover. Because the shadows are made with the language of mysteries.
architecture
A morning sunbath
These balconies are oriented to the East, so they receive sun in the morning. This place makes me think would make a nice painting with a theme similar to the ones so cherished by Hopper. I admire him so much… perhaps I was drew to this place precisely because made me evoke his art…
***
Estos balcones está orientados hacia el este, de tal manera que reciben sol por las mañanas. Este lugar me hace pensar que sería una pintura agradable con un tema similar a los que era tan afecto Hopper. Lo admiro tanto… tal vez me sentí atraído a este lugar precisamente porque me hizo evocar su arte…
Paolo et Francesa – escape from hell
Paolo and Francesca find a hole in the hell. They discover inside a tranquil blue sky and a colorful place to start again their love: hopefully they escape.
They fly a colorful city dreaming to touch each other with their wings. The colors start to melt inside the rotten shells, the sky burns and the shadows change their shapes into laughing beasts ripping Francesca with lupine tusks.
Paolo wakes up. He sees in silence the familiar whirlwind, there is no Francesca in it. He is alone.
Shapes and shadows of Santa Catalina…
Come in, I’ll show you the bluest world possible
Weeks ago I had published some photographs in film about this monastery in a visit with my friend Melissa (they say this monastery is the biggest on the world, probably because it certainly is a small city)
I process my photographs to match what I see and what I feel, sometimes I’m driven by a certain color or meaning, shooting at the same time with film helped me to understand better the colors. I hope you enjoy the trip.
Built with blocks of blue sky
Some of the buildings have a blue so intense that even the sky with its intense blue of the desert can appear almost invisible.
Sometimes a heart of flowers can be harder to break than a chain of iron
I wonder if that heart is product of a sensible gardener, or just product of my imagination…
Head portrait
There is a trend to use HDR techniques in photographs; put it in a quite simple, and unfair because it can get nice and natural images, way it’s a technique to get the most of details in shadows and highlights. But I love deep shadows, and under the sun of the desert in Santa Catalina the shadows are almost solid, turning the architecture in a sort of old watch pointing the path of time in the slow procession of the shadows.
Feline eye
A city without windows
It’s a crowded place with tourists, as I was in that moment, but being a city covering a large area there are always moments of ancient silence, that language that the ashlars of volcanic origin whisper after the heat of the day.
The photographs were shot in July, in winter; the season in the desert means clean blue skies.
If the ashes could talk…
I love kitchens, they are the place where a home has the strongest amount of familiar memories, conversations, moments, true life.
A red color trying to cross the blue wall
The photograph lines below is a place I’ve taken before so it could be familiar to you. But what I can say, I like it a lot and certainly to me it would be a wonderful place to read or just simply rest to the warm of the afternoon.
Enjoy the light and take a sit
Volumes and shapes of Santa Catalina
Blue and white
And that’s all, in a certain way it’s a sort of street photography of a city whose life now endures in a little (although quite comfortable and modern) corner. Although that’s good, I think it was a sad destiny to be in such a beautiful place but not by choice but for the cruel rules of tradition. In colonial times rich families used to send one daughter to buy influence from church. Now fortunately seems that heaven doesn’t need money ;-)
Remembering a time when it had fire
Lampa: The vermillion city of the blue windows
story of a murder
Lampa is an old city near my own city, in Lampa’s Province, in the heart of Puno’s region in Peru, at 3930 meters of altitude (12 893 ft.), it’s quite old but Spaniards re-founded it in 1678. This is called “The Pink City” or “The City of the Seven Wonders”… pink city for the color of the walls but to me they are more vermillion so I titled that way this article; it’s a small city so I don’t know which are those seven wonders, lol.
These photographs were took in 2007 with my first camera I was still one year away to end the university and I had the Hewlett Packard camera that my older brother gave me. So if you don’t tolerate noise I caution you to don’t continue if you care about your eyes XD
THE CITY
door to magician home
walking beyond the city surely we’ll find a heaven
caressing your vermillion skin
to squeeze my nose
let’s go
waiting…
man with monocle
walls before the long night
It looks empty but that’s because the population works in Juliaca and sleep there, so today it’s more a bedroom city. When Spaniards founded it the population was white, but after the Tupac Amaru’s revolution whites left the city and went to the coast.
SANTIAGO APÓSTOL TEMPLE
let’s build a church made of colors
The church is a colonial building dedicated to Saint James, sadly the complete name is “Saint James the Indian Killer”, and Spanish descendants consider us as “Indians” Of course I couldn’t adore, reverence or respect a figure meant to kill us o.O!! But the building is nice.
a closed door
In fact I saw the facade analyzed by an Italian architect in a classic text at university, the arch unifying the diverse elements under it.
gentle light upon the old stones
fields of happy green
a last bit of light
unlimited spaces surrounding the building
There is a mystery, although I think it’s more a secret, about why the tower is so far from the main body of the temple. I guess for some structural reason, but that’s just a thought.
intimate garden
My road of infinite geometry
ART AND NATURE
European echoes
The city hall has a copy, supposedly the only one on the world, of the Pietà of Michelangelo. That day everything was closed so I photographed from the window. I’ve seen it before when I was a kid, I liked it so much.
falling into infinite lines beyond the light
I found this green beauty inside the city hall. I like the idea of infinite.
sleeping Venus
This is a Venus found near Lampa, it seems we occupied it from several thousands of years ago. Our society, the native side at least, is a patriarchal-matriarchal one.
Fight!
c’mon! you want to climb me :D
These trees are a native species that in Aymara we call “Qiñwa”, in Spanish it’s called “queñual” and in English you would call it Polylepis. I climbed them once, they’ve such a texture! :-)
END
And well, this was part of that afternoon. We, my parents and brothers, took a bus to come back to Juliaca city.
a sky so close to us
Priscila building – La Paz
In my travels to La Paz I like to see the city but usually I don’t enjoy the buildings. The architecture is made professionally but they are copies of the buildings made in USA or Europe, that are quite excellent but to the reality of USA or Europe. Actually I noticed a massive presence of the architectural school of Modernism that has logic in the crowded countries of Europe after the twentieth century wars, but not in our countries in South America that have a third of the population and at least the double in area of those countries. Even more our societies have a happiness in colors and shapes, modernism in America is like use a disguise of Chinese; the modernism in Brazil worked because Niemeyer filled it with a honest Brazilian spirit of movement and music.
So I felt a big amazement when I saw the colorful building in the centre of the photograph. This condominium was designed by the talented architect Priscila Claure. Although I cannot do an architectural analysis without be in its interior I can say that the exterior and its urban presence is quite interesting and beautiful, it has proportion, scale and harmony. It has an inspiration in Piet Mondrian paintings, but in an urban scale that transmit correctly the happiness of our shared culture in the Andean Plateau where traditionally our clean buildings in time of parties were “dressed” with bold colors. Usually is said that we in architecture get the most of our creativity at 40’s, in the moment of the design the architect had 22 years old and designed the most memorable building I ever saw in La Paz. I’d love to see more of her production.
Certainly to the untrained eye it could resemble something of MVRDV’s Mirador Tower in Madrid, but that is far from reality, both buildings are quite different because the one in Spain is like a radiography of the differences in functions. In this Bolivian building instead there is a celebration of life and an optimism that says that to be authentic to yourself you don’t need to copy other models.
Arrangement
I’m architect. The feelings that I try to convey with my ideas (that I’ll publish in a near future) is something similar to this wall made in the seventieth century if my calculations are not wrong. It is just something direct, without adorns. Every element responds precisely to a question and the result is not just and answer but also a mystery that give birth to new questions that makes us richer.
There is a red wall. In this wall there is a door to enter, a window to receive natural light (both small because the need to do wide walls), a lantern to have light to the walkers at night, a gargoyle to the rains, and a bench to rest calm and quietly. But architecture is a service to human beings. Without them, as in this case, it’s not architecture, is more like a catalogue of architectural shapes. It needs the person to enters that door, to opens that window, to seats down in that bench.
About the photograph it’s one of my first post-processing I think almost three years ago, but the style is the same I have till today, I try that my photographs have an aspect similar to my architectonic drawings, where every line is “in focus” and the tridimensionality is given by the arrangement of the elements in the drawing. I never studied photography, if I had I’m sure I had a different photography, better I guess, but then again it would be more a job and I wouldn’t enjoy it so much.
The Art of Adobe
Yes, it’s a wall, a wall among thousand similar in Perú. But also is a symbol and a message.
That way is a constructive system created before the Spaniards invasion, and although in those times the art of construction has better technic and science (the earthquakes wipe everything except the old buildings, the rain reduce to dust the adobe except the old ones, the time eat every human signal except the old palaces) we still have our architectonic traditions.
The idea is pretty simple: A wall has a rock foundation, this foundation support the visible wall and this wall has a top. This top is built with triangles, the most stable architectonic shape. A triangle is a symbol of imperishable will, it allow to gain ventilation if it’s in an interior, it’s related too to the sacred triangles if it’s in buildings, it’s symmetric and can create a feel of care and civilization.
It seems rustic because it’s but in palaces is fine too. In the old times the expression was important and rustic or delicate it has to convey the idea of the designer. Not in vain architects had a distinctive symbol in their clothes to be known as ones.
The message is We are here and we are still we.
Seat down and feel free to see ;-)
Red
Blue aspirations
Qhapaq 