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

Late afternoon in the market

 

In Juliaca there are different types of market:

• There are the new malls where people likes to buy and walk with their children, I don’t like them because you need to wait in long queues and even worse for your privacy cashiers ask for your ID or cards
• There are the older markets as pictured in the photograph, this is called Santa Bárbara and I think it could be really ancient, I mean as several centuries long. In the highlands there aren’t fruits (remember we’re at more than 3800 meters/12000 feet) but the jungle is near so we eat fruits from the whole Peru and the jungle, the problem with these markets is that the sellers want you to be loyal to their stands and they can be a bit jealous if you buy from another person.
• The last type is my favorite, usually it’s in fairs with peasants or people from smaller cities as sellers, they have the products over a textile in the ground and they are indifferent to you until you ask or buy. Until then you’re comfortably invisible.

Once I posted big and super red apples, I bought them from one fair, probably in the market they could have cost a lot.

Errant of colorful kingdoms

I saw this cat in a hardware store. I’m not sure if was a he or she but it was quite warm and friendly :D I just entered and bought something very cheap to could photograph the cat :P

Arlequín

(Harlequin)

Señor F

bit by bit you grow in my grey world

 

A photograph I made about my colored pencils, that to illustration are my favorite tools. I unfocused the photograph till erase the frontiers in an abstract melody of colors.

Alone there is a patron

Ausence

Two brothers

 

Have you ever listen about Barragán? He was a marvelous architect, a delicate gentleman (is the impression I’ve reading his correspondence with Kahn) and a master landscaper.
Some years ago I bought a magazine, and in its pages I found an observation quoted from Barragán:

“… there are ways to make invisible a wall, one of them is paint it in blue and put vegetation in front of it. Another way is…”

That was like light, like fire in my mind. If you work with invisibility then you can work with anything you desire. Since then I never says no to any architectural challenge, sure, the answer can be harder to find, but I know that there exist at least one answer to a question, in fact the most of time there are a lot of answers, and several of those answers are in certain way a new question.

The wall on the picture (from the multicolored walls of Santa Catalina de Siena Monastery) hasn’t that effect because the vegetation would need to be more natural in their arrangement and because, of course, the builders probably didn’t want to vanish the wall but to get a beautiful effect of solitude with the christian God; nevertheless I cannot avoid to have a memento about the words of Barragán, satori perhaps could say the Japanese.