HASTA PRONTO – A Farewell to Paradise

As we bid a wistful farewell to magical Zihuatanejo for another year, I share the fifth and final round of my Tequila Shots -- visual sips of this place I find so delicious and intoxicating.

These images pick up on the theme of my previous post, Up Close and Far Away, which invites amateur photographers—in fact, anyone who wants to see the world and life in more nourishing ways—to always be aware of both the exquisite detail and the broader context of virtually everything we experience.

UP CLOSE AND FAR AWAY – The Soul of Vacation Photography

When one is on vacation, as Sally and I are for a month here in Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, Mexico, one tends to appreciate sweeping new vistas. A tropical climate, with its exotic flora and fauna, cuts in on what was proving a long, grudging dance with a northern winter. A whole people with faces, words and customs perhaps different from our own.

We want to paint it all with a broad brush, taking long shots of the sea, the beach...maybe the bar.  Look, Facebook friends, I am here!—we want them to see as much as possible in one or two photos. About as close to details we come is when we take pictures of the people we're sharing that experience with. And too many of those are taken quite spontaneously, with no regard for a background that might impart even the slightest notion of specifically where we are.
 
I've finally come to realize...why the question, "Want to see our vacation photos?" elicits more lame excuses than "Can you help us move?"

A SENSE OF PLACE
Believe me, I've taken hundreds of exactly that kind of photo. But I've finally come to realize—most often weeks later when I show them to someone else—why the question, "Want to see our vacation photos?" elicits more lame excuses than "Want to help me move?" The reason? Most of those images have no soul.

So in recent years, though I still shoot the occasional "look where I am and who's with me here" landscape and portrait, I've found myself drawn to more subjects I hope will capture a deeper sense of place and culture.

Here are some of those soul shots I've taken this month in and around Zihuatanejo. Images capturing very specific places—some of them no bigger than a square foot; the colors, shapes and patterns of a natural environment and a culture. And people—most often not posing, but captured at play or on the job, perhaps in a happy or pensive or poignant moment.

If you're still with me to this point, I think you can tell that, every year, I leave more here in this lovely town than a chunk of dinero; I also leave a piece of my heart.

The Holy Week crowd of Mexican tourists begins on Playa La Ropa

Yeah! Maybe that older guy with the limp and the camera!

Up and away!

Primordial patterns

The breezy colors of la Calle Adelita

Sign-painting crew about to add sponsors' logos to firemen tribute

To every season...even if it's only two

Still life with fertility goddess & re-bar

Proud mamá and her beautiful little girl

Sí, I am zi one zat inspired Godzilla

She's kept an eye out for fashion trends along Juan Alvarez for nearly a decade.

Entrance to the Vega household

One of Zihuatanejo's excellent strolling minstrels - a dying breed

Yellow-Crowned Night Heron

Who is this young man whose passport photo settled into this crude stairway?

Fish guts - one of Zihuatanejo's many stunning murals

Banded Peacock - Anartia fatima

ART OF THE AGES – Lichen Painting on the St. Croix

The canvas: eons-old basalt. The medium: lichen, some of whose individual organisms may well have been here when the first European laid eyes on these cliffs. The artist: well…the Artist was here before there was a “here.”

It takes a moment of reflection to grasp the age of these rocks. They date from the Precambrian Eon, somewhere between 500 million and a billion years ago.

         The brushwork...looks wild and free 
         for work rendered so patiently.

This bluish-gray, Keweenawan altered basalt is the hardest basalt-type rock in America—so hard that boulders of it were used by NASA to test the drills employed on the moon probe. Since this type of basalt is found almost entirely on ocean floors, these terrestrial outcroppings in the Upper and Lower Dalles of the St. Croix River (which forms 169 miles of the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin), are considered quite rare, if not unique.

Some lichen species*, incredibly, are nearly as old as these rocks. First appearing on earth some 400 million years ago, they are here represented in at least five colors—including jet black. (Since there are hundreds of varieties documented along the St. Croix Valley, I won’t pretend to identify them.)

The brushwork—ranging from broad splashes, to wispy dry-brush, to seemingly random spots and drips—looks wild and free for work rendered so patiently. For that trick of time, for the composition of form and color and texture, the technique is breathtaking.

I am in awe.

* There are more than 10,000 species of lichen. They are composite, symbiotic organisms often comprising both a fungus and an alga. The former provides structure; the latter, sustenance, through photosynthesis. Most species grow less than a millimeter per year, and, given a durable substrate like this primordial basalt, can easily live for centuries.