Full
This month our Wall Project assignment was “Full”. Possibly a tricky theme, I thought, but being a glass-half-full kind of person I set about looking for full things. I found a cupboard full of food, a street packed with people, a full moon, a rock covered in sunbathing turtles and a balcony full of plants.
Difficult to choose a pic for the wall this time… Mario liked the cupboard, Mely voted for the moon and I went for the balcony. The moon got the most second votes though, and it’s interestingly mysterious, so it’ll be gracing our (nearly full) wall in the next few days.
100 Years On La Gran Via
View of Gran Via, looking west to Plaza de España.
100 years ago yesterday, waving a gold and silver pick, King Alfonso 13th inaugurated Madrid’s Gran Via. The principal avenue bisecting the city from East to West is an eclectic mix of architectural influences, from neo-baroque to art-deco to modernist and back again, and boasts Europe’s first skyscraper (the Telefónica Building). This morning it was closed to traffic and crammed with people hoping to get a glimpse of King Juan Carlos, Alfonso’s grandson, launch the festivities to commemorate the avenue’s 100th birthday. My route home from my morning class took me along Gran Via, but I was in a hurry to get back for lunch and didn’t wait to see whether Juan Carlos was waving a gold and silver pick like his grandfather.
Surreal
“Oddly dreamlike; incongruous juxtapositions; phantasmagoric imagery”. With this definition from the Free Online Dictionary in mind, I went about exploring the latest Wall Project theme: ‘Surreal’.
As I explored, I found a view of the Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s ‘Kilometre Zero’ that appeared to have been cut up into little pieces and haphazardly glued back together again (top).
I looked into puddles and saw the city upside-down (middle),
and I met a tube-guzzling graffiti monster (bottom).
It was a theme that was fun to shoot, and difficult to choose which of this edit of 3 to put on the wall, but in the end, Mely, Mario and I decided that the Puerta del Sol was the most interesting image. Reflected in the kaleidoscopic glass cupola of the new entrance to Sol metro station, Madrid’s principal square is distorted into a chaotic kingdom reigned over by the Tio Pepe sherry bottle and Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter. But is it dreamlike, or nightmarish?
Looking at the City Upside-Down
What to do on a cold, rainy weekend? Staying tucked up in bed comes to mind, but I had to work on our latest assignment – the theme ‘surreal’. So I spent last weekend crouching over puddles, taking pictures of the city reflected upside-down in the water. I’ve inverted the images, so the reflections look the right way up, but the street is the wrong way round.
The first picture is in Calle Fuencarral, a trendy shopping area near the Plaza del Sol.
Below that is the Palacio de Comunicaciones, now the offices of the Mayor of Madrid.
Finally, a war memorial commemorating the uprising of 2nd of May 1808. Goya’s Los Fusilamientos del 3 de Mayo, perhaps the most famous image of the failed rebellion against Napoleonic forces, can be seen next door in El Prado.
Three Views of the Alhambra
We visited the Alhambra on a stormy Tuesday morning just before Christmas. Our assignment for our wall picture was to come up with something different from the thousands of postcards that can be found in the city’s souvenir shops. Taking an original picture of such a photographed architectural icon was quite a challenge, although the rain helped us avoid copying the postcards. Actually my favourite is the view of the palace accompanied by the smiling bollard (see The Painted Streets of Granada), but I was outvoted and the ceiling arches (top) made the wall.
