Chevalier at Le Sacre Coeur

The imposing Chevalier barring the entrance to the church presents itself as the guardian of his faith. There is always something very intriguing -scary even- about the twined lines running from church to state and vice versa.
But the photographer supersedes the speculative mind of the pedestrian and has to take a shot. Inside the church, two groups of nuns were competing who would hit the highest note in a choral exchange made this side of heaven.

Funeral Day, London 2002

The day was as gloomy as can be and I was in London by chance. Down the road from Trafalgar Square, the funeral ceremonies for the Queen Mother were taking place. There were troopers from the down under and Gurkas dressed with the sober garb of their land, and English veterans of vieux guerres looking proud and dripping with medals.
I decided to have my lunch among the pigeons and sat down overlooking the fountains and the imposing lions.
And then took this shot of Nelson's Column. Afterwards I turned it around and made myself a paper negative, which in the end happened to be a most faithful representation of the time and the place.

Very Distant Relatives, Colombia 1983

The title for this image was a burst of inspiration.
It was issued as a personal comment infected with a big dose of self-deprecating and humorous content. Or so I thought.
Time has proven that I was not so far off the mark, and the title itself has become a true statement, considering that if I look at myself in the mirror, long enough, I will be able to see myself as a replica of one of these fellows, or - is it the other way around?

Vieja leyendo, Paris, 2005

There is always the postcard that was never intended to be. Paris has its armies of old timers doing all sorts of things all over town. This woman was reading oblivious to the hustle and bustle of life in the busy avenue a few meters away whilst doing what comes natural on a sunny spring morning in the park.

Hombre, Colombia, 1975

I've always felt that once reality disappears quickly into the past, memory establishes its reign. But as time passes and memory tends to divagate and waiver from what was and what might have been, then some images become the memory of dreams. This one is one of those.

Neil Sloman, Photographer

My colleague Neil Sloman has been making portraits of artists in their environments around Southern Kent for the past three years. His efforts have now come to fruition with a major exhibition in Canterbury in February 2007. He has been photographing with a view camera, a cumbersome contraption, which yields amazing results for those adventurous enough to explore the universe outside the boundaries of medium format. His work is classic in the sense that it does not stray from the established standards of quality and outlook long ago set by masters of the form (Newman, Beaton, et al) and it is made all the more admirable by the fact that he has done it in between his duties as an Art History and Photography teacher at Canterbury College.

Birthday Long Ago...

In 2000 we came to live in England; well, not really England, it was rather a dismal little cottage on a hill somewhere in South Kent. Then my fifty second birthday came in May 2001 and as such I did my yearly self-portrait and this is what came out of the negative: a man trapped in a room inside a country totally alien to his soul, surrounded by soggy grass and cold rain. Then it all clicked in; all I had to do to discover my real self in the portrait was to trace geometric patterns in search of a solution to my sadness and alienation.
Here it is, in all its functional dysfunction: I am the cat and I am being held by an alien being who looks remarkably suspicious like my former incarnation as Lalo Borja.