The sea that taught me how to look
Today is the 9th of October, the national day of the País Valencià, my land, and it feels right to spend a while looking homewards.
I grew up in a fishing village in the Marina Baixa, with family from la Vila Joiosa, that town of brightly coloured houses which, so the story goes, were painted that way so fishermen could pick out their own from out at sea. I have no idea whether that is true or just one of those things that gets repeated because it is lovely, but I like to think the first thing I ever learned about images I learned there: that colour is for finding your way back.
Learning to look at what was already in front of you
When I started taking photographs I did not go far. There was no need. I went down to the same rocks where I had spent whole childhood summers, the ones you know by heart because you have skinned your knees on every single one, and it turned out there was something there I had never seen. Or had seen a thousand times without ever looking at it.
What changes is not the place. What changes is the hour. The first time I got up in the dark to be at the shore before the sun, I understood all at once why the fishermen of my village got up at that hour without complaining. At that hour the sea is not a landscape, it is something that is happening.
Of every photograph I have taken, the one I love most is still from here: The Rocky Window, in la Vila. A hole in the rock that was there long before me and will be there long after, and which for a few specific minutes on a few specific days of the year lets you watch the magic happen. You have to go, wait, and sometimes come home with nothing. I learned that here too.
Lockdown, and how close everything was
There are two photographs I cannot look at without remembering that strange spring: Confinement Days (I) and Confinement Days (II), both taken in Finestrat, a short way from home.
For those months the world shrank to the size of the neighbourhood, and that was exactly when it dawned on me how much I had within walking distance and had never photographed, because I had been busy thinking about going somewhere else. The usual story: we want the far-off mountain while our own sits right behind us.
And ours is el Puig Campana. If you grew up in the Marina Baixa nobody needs to point it out to you: it is the mountain that stands on its own, with no range around it to soften the shape, and an enormous notch cut out of its west ridge. El Portell de Roldà, we call it. The story goes that Roland opened it with one swing of his sword, and that the missing piece flew all the way out to sea and stayed there, as the island of Benidorm. It is not true, of course, but it is the kind of untruth you are told as a child, and it leaves you looking at that mountain differently for the rest of your life. There is no other like it, and I had it fifteen minutes from home.
It is ours at night as well
Then came the obsession with nights. Shining in the Shortest Night, in la Vila, on the shortest night of the year. Our Galaxy from the Old Castle, with the Milky Way above a castle deep in the Guadalest valley, at the foot of the Serra d'Aitana, which has spent centuries watching things go by. Window to the Sea, from inside a cave, with the stars slipping in through the opening.
And the ones that are pure textbook Mediterranean, making no apology for it: Drive Me to the Warm Sea, Some Warm Light in the Blue Morning with the Penyal d'Ifac at Calp behind it, or the lighthouse under the strawberry moon.
Gràcies, terreta
If I ended up photographing landscapes it is because I grew up somewhere the landscape comes in through the window. I did not choose it, I got lucky.
So today, of all days, let me put it in writing: everything I know about light I learned looking at this coast. If you fancy seeing the rest of what I have brought back from around here, it is all under País Valencià.
Bon 9 d'octubre.