The Pena Palace sits on the top of a ridge above Sintra, Portugal, a short train ride from Lisbon. (You do have to get to the ridge from the train station, perhaps a story for another time.) It is a remarkable structure that appears like something from a fantasy, especially in the foggy and rainy conditions while we were there. The palace and its turrets and towers are painted in brilliant colors.
Continue reading Detail, Pena Palace
I have visited some remarkable cathedrals in Europe, and I obviously have seen stained glass windows. But I paid less attention to the light shining through them until we visited Sagrada Familia in Barcelona a few years ago. We entered late in the day as light streamed though that church’s remarkable windows, and the effect was simply astonishing. After that I began to notice similar, though subtler, effects in other big churches.
Continue reading Stained Glass Light
This is a small section of a wall in Brussels, Belgium. We passed it while out on a very long (almost all day) walk through the city. I’m fascinated by walls like this one, where layers of personal messages and markings have built up over time, juxtaposed in sometimes-surprising ways to produce a kind of found art.
These things often consist of some combination of actual “art” (often small, personal drawings), bits of text including tags and quotes, random smears of paint, remnants of paper fliers in the process of weathering and falling off. They become short-term time capsules as layers build up, with the newest material on top and the oldest visible through the newer materials in places.
Leave a comment or question using the form. (If you are reading this on the home page, click the article title to see the full article and the comment form.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email
All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.
An alley in Ghent, Belgium is called the “graffiti street” or the “graffiti alley.” (The latter is more apt, since it is a very narrow walkway.) The walls (and sometimes the pavement) are covered with a wild mix of tags, graffiti, and street art. New imagery is continuously added on top of the old, and the intersections of these old and new images can be fascinating.
I have mixed feelings about photographing graffiti and street art, at least when it isn’t just an unavoidable element of the scene or an embellishment on other subjects. But here, the individual work is subsumed by the sum of it all, and in ways that hardly could have been anticipated by those who produced the deeper layers.
Leave a comment or question using the form. (If you are reading this on the home page, click the article title to see the full article and the comment form.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email
All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others.