Spanish Diptych
Photographing in Spain always brings out the BOLD in me. My first trip there was in 1974, and I ended up staying for a while with my girlfriend's mother on Ibiza during the late winter. I was just starting to make photographs; I didn't have a clue what to do with a camera other than push the shutter release. One image I made was of small hilly, mountainous island jutting out of the Mediterranean with the weak winter sun behind it. Later, back home someone saw the photograph and told me what an artist I was. I had never even considered the possibility of being an artist. Bottom line, that photograph plus a couple of others from around New England got me hooked on photography. A year later I quit my day job, I hopped on a Polish freighter, and I moved to Europe with all the accoutrements for a B&W darkroom (Those were the days). Once in France, I started to teach myself photography. That didn't mean I was a photographer yet, even by a long stretch of the imagination. But I had the bug, and I started to learn. During the year-and-a-half that I lived in Europe I spent a lot of time in Spain. And after I came back to the United States, I periodically returned to Spain to visit friends and to photograph. My most recent Spanish sojourn was for my wife's 50th birthday several years ago. It was one of my last trips using film as my primary photographic medium (although I was beginning to dabble with a digital point-and-shoot camera). From that last Spanish visit, here are a pair of Spanish images, bright in color, abstract in composition, intentionally painterly, and without manipulation.
