Constellation Theater's Blood Wedding

Constellation Theater's Blood Wedding opens this weekend at Source theater on 14th Street!

The lobby will include a few of my photographs of the Cortijo del Fraile, the site of the real-life tragedy that inspired Lorca's play. The image above was taken last November, showing the current state of the old cortijo.

Lovers are torn apart as two families in rural Spain are intricately bound in an unbreakable cycle of murder and revenge. Experience passion and violence mixed with song and ceremony. Federico García Lorca illuminates our deepest desires with gorgeous poetic imagery and the haunting appearance of a human Moon.

Directed by Shirley Serotsky. English Translation by Tanya Ronder. 90 minutes, with live music.

Visit constellationtheatre.org and use the code SPAIN for $20 General Admission Tickets!

Also this Thursday and Friday 2/2/ and 2/3 are Pay What You Can!

Aldous Huxley's Almeria

In mid-October of 1929, Aldous Huxley and his first wife Maria Nys set out on a road trip through Spain in their scarlet two-seated Bugatti. Starting in Barcelona, where Huxley had attended a conference which left him bored and wanting to escape, they went south along the coast through Valencia and Murcia, on to Almeria, then west to Granada, Cadiz, and Seville, before heading north again to Madrid and back to France. The entire trip took abut five weeks. Shortly after returning, Huxley described Spain as "the strangest country in Europe ... one of the oddest in the world even."

The landscape of Almeria left an indelible impression on Huxley. He expressed the harsh extremes of the environment in a poem which appeared in the collection The Cicadas and Other Poems in 1931:

ALMERIA

Winds have no moving emblems here, but scour
A vacant darkness, an untempered light;
No branches bend, never a tortured flower
Shuders, root-weary, on the verge of flight;
Winged future, withered past, no seeds nor leaves
Attest those swift invisible feet: they run
Free through a naked land, whose breast receives
All the fierce ardour of a naked sun.
You have the light for lover. Fortunate Earth!
Conceive the fruti of his divine desire.
But the dry dust is all she brings to birth,
That child of clay by even celestial fire.
Then come, soft rain and tender clouds, abate
This shining love that has the force of hate

Some thirty years later he recalled his trip in a letter to local professor Arturo Medina (who was married briefly to Almeria cultural fixture Celia Viñas before her death). Huxley saw the dry, barren earth as a kind of philosophical metaphor. The landscape of Almeria, he wrote, "seemed to express my own preocupation with the problem of 'pure' intellectuality, 'pure' spirituality -- too much sun but no rain." As they left the city of Almeria and entered the desert, "there was a tremendous wind and the sun was blazing -- 'the winds of doctrine' in combination with 'spiritual light'; but no moisture, none of the vegetative life of nature itself."

The trip came at a critical time in Huxley's intellectual development, a few years before the publication of Brave New World. He feared that growing materialism and rapid technological advancement would stifle independent thinking and spiritual growth. A fundamental humanistic element, he believed, was lacking from the twentieth century scientific mind.

Huxley recalled that they had driven south out of the city; he was clearly wrong, as such an itinerary would have taken them into the Mediterranean ocean. Instead, as the couple was moving on to Granada, they would have headed north and through the Tabernas desert.

The photograph above was taken in November from a now unused section of the old road to Granada. Huxley surely passed this spot, around the same date eighty two years ago.

The Denver Mine

The surviving structures of the Denver mining plant hang precariously off the hillside above the town of Rodalquilar, inside the Cabo de Gata natural park. The buildings still bear black painted letters--”Dorm Block B,” “Guard Block D”--from a movie production almost 30 years ago. The foundations of the separation tanks create enormous circles at the bottom of the hill. Across the plain lies the Mediterranean ocean.

The mining industry transformed the landscape of Almeria during the nineteenth century as modern technology allowed for large scale exploitation of iron, lead and other resources. Activity slowed during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, after which the fascist government took control of the site at Rodalquilar. At the time, it was believed there were vast gold deposits hidden under ground. During the 1950s, the state constructed the Denver plant along with dozens of houses for workers, schools, a pharmacy, and other buildings. However, the mine's resources didn't live up to expectations. The mine was closed on March 9, 1966, less than ten years after it opened.

The remains were later rediscovered by filmmakers looking for an otherwordly location. In the early summer of 1985, dozens of technicians and laborers began constructing a massive set on top of the old mine buildings, turning it into a post-apocalyptic prison camp. The movie Solarbabies takes place in the future after a global drought has turned the planet into a desert and a mysterious police state, called The Protectorate, controls all water resources. Children are raised in orphanages where they become prisoners of the system. At the center of the story are a rebellious group of adolescents who escape at night to play a version of lacrosse on rollerskates.

The film was widely derided as a cheap Mad Max imitator and labeled "an apalling stinker" by Leonard Maltin. But it includes several familiar faces from the 80s, including Jami Gertz, Jason Patric, and Lukas Haas, along with rollerskating chase scenes over desert landscapes that were specially paved over for the film. The painted letters still readable on the mine buildings mark the prison dorm and guard buildings. One of the police vehicles, an oversized metal armadillo, still sits on a lot behind an old western movie set in Tabernas.

A few years later the site was transformed again to medieval England. In The Reckoning, starring Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany, a traveling theater troupe arrives in a strange, isolated town at the base of a castle and then get entangled in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of a local boy. The castle, constructed on top of the mine buildings, towers over the town below. Tudor facades follow the circular foundations at the bottom of the bill, creating a surreal, curving structure, which also provides the round theater the players perform in. The entire landscape is covered with a layer of snow throughout the film. A long stairway which runs up the right side of the mine facility can be picked out in the film, but the site seems otherwise entirely unrecognizable.

The team spent over 6 weeks constructing the set. The film itself received lukewarm reviews, criticized for being unoriginal and pedantic. But Andrew McAlpine’s production design was singled out for its ingenuity. Variety magazine wrote:

The Reckoning’s most impressive player ... is its stunning set. When scouting expeditions in England failed to yield a viable medieval village, the producers opted to create one in Spain. On the ruins of an abandoned gold mine, production designer Andrew McAlpine and his team built a thoroughly convincing 14th century town, complete with a castle for de Guise.

In reality the climate is not nearly so harsh as it appears in either film. Just out of view is the Mediterranean ocean and one of its most stunning, undeveloped beaches.

A production still of the set from The Reckoning, from Andrew McAlpine's website.

La Chanca

“The perspective of Almeria, viewed from the heights of the Alcazaba, is one of the most beautiful in the world.”                                  --Juan Goytisolo, La Chanca

Almeria’s Alcazaba, a Moorish castle perched above the city, overlooks the neighborhood of La Chanca. It is a historically impoverished zone made up of small dwellings built into the hillside on the outskirts of the city. The inhabitants painted their homes using whatever ingredients were available, creating a multicolored patchwork. Ruins still remain of a nineteenth century lead mining and transport operation that ran down the mountain to the nearby port. La Chanca has long been home to a diverse population, including fishermen and their families, a strong community of gypsies, and, more recently, immigrants from Morocco.

The panoramic image above is a composite of several photographs I took from the far tower of the Alcazaba about 11am on a Saturday in August. A version of the image with embedded explanatory notes and links is available on my Flickr page here, and a larger size image with greater detail is available here.

Juan Goytisolo, Spain’s most influential literary exile, described the same view in 1962:

“The district of La Chanca crouches at your feet, luminous and white, like an invention of the senses. In the depths of the valley, the modest houses appear like a game of dice, thrown there capriciously. The geological violence, the nakedness of the landscape is frightening. Tiny, rectangular, the huts climb the slope and set themselves in the broken geography of the mountain, carved like carbuncles. Around La Chanca, the yellow rock extends itself the same as an ocean, the rugged undulations of the moorland cut off in the ridges of the Sierra de Gádor. The overlook takes in an expansive panorama and the observer feels a little like the Diablo Cojuelo.* The inhabitants of the suburb carry on with their wretched lives without worrying that they are being watched from above. From time to time, a guide ponders the marvels of the place and the tourists poke out of the battlements and bombard it with their cameras.”

*The mischievous “Crippled Devil” who, in a popular version of the story, reveals the tricks and misfortunes that occur inside the walls of the apartments of Madrid.

La Chanca has a complex history with photographers and photography. Goytisolo’s book did not include any photographs. In fact, a family he visits tells him about a French couple who had recently shown up with a “portrait machine.” The grandmother wanted her grandchildren to wash and dress up for the photograph, but the tourists told them not to, preferring to photograph them in their disheveled state. They took over 100 photographs. The grandmother later confesses to Goytisolo that she didn’t understand their true intentions at the time. “Sometimes one does things without understanding,” she says, “I think if they came now I would curse them.”

Local photographer Carlos Perez Siquier began documenting the streets and people of La Chanca in 1957. He visited the neighborhood on weekends while free from his day job at a local bank. With limited funds, he sometimes used discarded pieces of unexposed film from movie productions in Almeria. Perez Siquier explained in an interview years later that his intent was not to denounce the conditions of La Chanca or conduct a sociological study, but simply to show the people as they are and reveal their dignity among difficult circumstances. Elsewhere he wrote:

"My attention is directed to daily life, in all its visible manifestations. It is not the strange or unusual that most attracts my eye, as its value depends largely on the unexpected. It is the simple and everyday, the authentic in its vulgarity, that I want to highlight intensely.”

Perez Siquier continued to return to La Chanca over the years. His early photographs, in black and white, are scenes from neighborhood life lived largely in the streets. Children playing, a laughing wedding party, a couple carrying an oversized wardrobe, or a crowd gathered around a tightrope walker. A few of the frames focus on stark abstract shapes, patterns created by hanging clothes and shadows on the ground, a black umbrella hanging upside down against a white wall, or a series of white chimneys rising out of the eroded rock wall. He later began using color film, showcasing the varied palette of the painted houses. In one series of images, he hones in on multicolored layers of peeling paint emerging from walls and doors.

Perez Siquier’s early images were part of a new photography movement emerging in Spain during the 1950s and 60s. The new photography rejected the officially sanctioned images which romanticized the Spanish landscape and traditional village life. Instead, they favored realism and focused on marginalized communities and the urban periphery. Along with Madrid and Barcelona, Almeria became a locus for the photographic vanguard. Perez Siquier’s images of La Chanca first appeared in Afal, an influential photography magazine published out of Almeria.

At the same time, Goytisolo’s book was published covertly in Paris and for years was not openly available in Spain. When a Spanish edition finally emerged in 1981, under a newly-democratic government, it was one of Perez Siquier’s images that was used for the cover.

The topography of La Chanca has changed in recent decades. Orderly rows of newly constructed homes can be seen above the older neighborhood below, and the expanded coastal highway now runs along the top of the hillside. La Chanca has also been gaining international attention for its unique model of social organization and integration. City services do not extend up the steep, winding streets along the hillside, so residents have developed cooperatives to clean and maintain public spaces. The public school includes classes in Arabic language and culture, and students learn about the diverse history of the region through musical performances and festivals. At the same time, however, the neighborhood remains isolated from the rest of the city. A local organization is working to gain UNESCO recognition for La Chanca as a cultural World Heritage site.

Local singer/songwriter Sensi Falán includes more outstanding views of La Chanca in her recent music video.

The Final Duel

Mortimer stands eyeing his Colt Buntline Special on the ground, which has just been shot out of his hand. Indio approaches holding a musical watch. Inside the watch is a picture of Mortimer’s sister, who shot herself while being raped by Indio. The two gunmen stand inside a large circle bounded by a low stone wall at the edge of town. In the background is only desert, a few dry shrubs and distant mountains. Manco approaches, offering his gunbelt and pistol to Mortimer before taking a seat on the low wall. The duel begins. As Indio starts to reach for his gun, he is knocked down by Mortimer’s bullet.

The final duel scene from For a Few Dollars More is one of the most memorable in western film history. The scene was shot outside the town of Los Albaricoques in the desert of Níjar. Sergio Leone made use of this location for several scenes throughout the Dollars trilogy.

In recent years the town has grown rapidly, adding plots of modern townhomes. Cars line the narrow lanes. And the modest white houses which once stood in for a dusty Mexican pueblo have been fixed up and repainted. However, local officials have renamed the streets to honor their history -- one famous scene was filmed on what is now Calle Clint Eastwood. The circular ring from the final duel scene has also been reconstructed on the original site, seen in the photo above (click on the photo for a larger image). The row of houses in the background are new. But the small white building and round tower directly in back of the ring can be seen in the film, much as they are today.

Installation Day at the BMA

Monday was installation day for the 2011 Sondheim Artscape Prize exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Each of the finalists has an entire room in the exhibit space. For my space, we installed 14 pieces, including two large panoramic images 38" x 75". The staff at the BMA was outstanding, and of course they did all the real work of hanging and lighting everything. Saturday the space opens to the public.

The Beaches of Cabo de Gata

Tuesday's Frugal Traveler column in the New York Times covers the undeveloped and (so far) undiscovered beaches of Cabo de Gata in Almeria, Spain. In fact, author Seth Kugel describes his ideal beach as:

one that you come upon after a hilly, rocky hike over scrub-covered hills. It's a half-moon cove of ashen sand flanked at either end by rock formations that look like giant Impressionistic sand castles. Instead of palms, occasional yellow and purple wildflowers dot the nearby hills; instead of mojitos there are mandarin oranges and nispero fruits bought at a farmer's market; instead of warm Caribbean ripples, there is bracing Mediterranean surf to cool you down under cloudless skies.

He's referring to the Cala de Entremedio, but the description could easily fit several secluded beaches within the Cabo de Gata-Nijar Nature Reserve. Kugel also notes that parts of Lawrence of Arabia were filmed there, among other films. But he was a little too cheap to try the fresh seafood at La Ola, my favorite spot, where you order based on drawings of the fish brought in that day. More of my Almeria recommendations here.

I took the photo above of a nineteenth century fortification at Los Escullos in the Cabo de Gata park.

Off the press

Printing ...

Interview in La Voz de Almeria April 24

The Uncover Series: Curator Amanda Maddox's selections at FotoDC Flash

FotoDC's Uncover Series, part of the current Flash exhibit in Crystal City, has  a story behind it (and some basic math): On Sunday, February 6th, five industry  experts gathered at the Corcoran Gallery of Art & College of Design, to meet and  review the work of 165 regional photographers who had responded to the call from FotoDC for submissions.  Each curator selected five photographers whose work  represented a cohesive and creative vision, with technical excellence, for a total representation of twenty-five.

Four of my panoramic photographs of the old Spaghetti Western film lots in Almeria, Spain, were selected for this exhibit by Amanda Maddox, Associate Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She organized her selection around the theme of the road and the views it provides us into real and imagined lives. Here is her text that accompanies the exhibit panels:

 

In his seminal text On the Road, Jack Kerouac declared “it’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.” This maxim applies to many contexts and travelers alike, but it resonates with a tradition specific to the history of modern and contemporary photography. On the open road, zigzagging across state lines, such pioneering photographers as Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Walker Evans located moments of irony, mystery, and chance. Their idiosyncratic observations of life, taken from car windows and street corners, mesmerize with a quiet lyricism. Other photographers, such as Jeff Wall and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, tell stories of how we live by staging images on the street.

Roads and streets serve as familiar terrain in these works by five local photographers. Alongside American highways, Nicholas Syracuse and Daniel Kempner isolate an anonymous population that comprises the everyday fabric of the nation. Jeff Deemie and Mark Parascondola go behind the scenes in two towns—a small Texas community and a long-abandoned Spaghetti Western stage set in Spain—to reveal the waystation as a complex, elusive landscape. The journey itself (and all of the places in between) takes center stage in Brady Robinson’s featured projects Transfer and Shift. For Robinson, and for the other photographers, the seemingly unremarkable byways constitute an anywhere road. These roads lead us to vital places, and to the heart of things.