Recently, I read an article titled "Bystander:The History of Street Photography". It helped me to understand my own artistic proclivities and how my writing is part of my photography. The stories, the poems i tried to write have somehow taken shape in my photos. Strange but i feel very good about this.My photos wish to capture a narrative or lyrical feel. Their composition is more or less organic, that is, my form is born out the feeling for my subject. Like so many other artist I too wish to find the relation of things, especially how people fit into their surroundings. The character of a place, a city, or country is defined by the manners of its people. For example, the way a person walks along a street or leans against a wall is peculiar to that particular city. The city, the wall, the walk, the person, his past and future are all one for that very instant. One does not exist without the other. Frankly these shots do not come easily. They cannot and must not be staged. You must wait. I see them as gifts, a few gems i have been allowed to gather. While waiting, i take pictures of doors, portals, breathing statues, trees, and images of gods, just to stay in practice. This is kind of like taking notes. As you know the trick of "street photography" is how does you remain anonymous - to become the bystander, a posture writing by its own quiet nature allows. I was relieved to know others face the same dilemma.

The Black and White photographs are few selections from a show titled "Once in Europa, the timid sang". Mostly shot in the early morning under the light of gray skies, the full series examined the timeless melancholy found in the people, the churches, the streets and the landscapes of Portugal, Spain, and Italy. So infused in its character, this mood of longing and detachment, irony and ennui transforms the ordinary and the routine into images of a rich and poetic drama.

In spite of the inexorable onrush of mechanized life with its boisterous traffic, ubiquitous cell phones, and its dilution of traditions, there exist an underlying essence, a haunting immutable rhythm, which enables these countries to maintain their unique flavor and timbre. One had to only to wander on a worn monastery path in a pine forest in Portugal or along a poor fishermen's beach in Italy or linger in a piazza in Rome to find that unchanging and very human, sometimes mystical, sense of place that seems to define the way of life in southern Europe.

Sheets in a Convent Window Buçaco, Portugal. These simple sheets framed in the window transform the ordinary into a mood of timelessness.

The Leper, Rome. A usually densely crowded piazza in Rome becomes empty as a beggar woman, hiding the dark poetry of her disease, faces another moment of isolation.

Castle Aragonese, Ischia, Italy. Outside my grandfather's home is surely the same unchanged view that his grandfather looked upon each morning as he prepared the nets for fishing.

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