colonia: las ventanas (y las puertas)

looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. there is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. what one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. in that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
(charles baudelaire)

i noticed recently when looking through my photos that there were some recurring subjects that i’d unconsciously been collecting wherever i go. windows & doors are one theme that seems to feature prominently. like baudelaire, i find closed windows intriguing & mysterious – they make me want to peek in & see what’s going on inside. i wonder how they’re furnished, who lives there, what is the garden like, have the owners put their blood, sweat & tears into it or are they just renters, what spirit of the inhabitants & their daily lives are imprinted on the building itself. but the open windows definitely arouse my interest as well – many offer just a tantalising glimpse of inside; others are thrown wide open to allow you to see almost the entire room or house. with some, the life of the house spills out into the public domain – the inhabitants chat & relax out the front, kids’ toys are in the yard, glorious gardens are planted in windowboxes & garden beds. these are some that i took in colonia in just two days!

what themes intrigue you and draw you back again and again?

inhabited

just a quick little post for the weekend! i’ve showed you some of the colour film images that i took in south america, including several from buenos aires that i displayed in my feria exhibition at sonido! cafe. i loved the beautiful soft light and colours that my canon tx captured during my time there. but i also shot with black & white film while i was there. it’s interesting to reflect on the difference in feel between images produced with colour film and those made with black & white, on the same camera in the same area of buenos aires at around the same time in similar light. 

to me the colour shots seem whimsical and dreamlike with a vintage feel. in contrast the b&w shots are sharp and defined with a simplicity that that lends itself to particular types of urban scenes that i so love to shoot. the images that i shoot in b&w are often simpler in their composition than my colour shots; they usual emphasise the built environment and, although the people that inhabit that environment are present, they are almost incidental to the scene. of course the contrast between these people and the solid structures surrounding them only serve to highlight their humanity and perhaps their fragility.

sometimes this is deliberate but, more often, i think it’s actually an unconscious process when i’m shooting b&w. my composition changes to this more simple style, with architectural forms and lines often the driving force, starkly contrasting with the people in the images.

i hope you enjoy these images – all shot in buenos aires in 2009. for those of you in melbourne you can see these four particular images in real life at brunswick street gallery in the photography 11a group show, on until 3 february.

girl in the yellow dress

 

girl in the yellow dress, san telmo, buenos aires, argentina, 2009 © nicole davis

Oh so here I am with a blog. I am not a complete stranger to social networking, tweeting and facebooking regularly and sometimes writing posts for my work blog. But my own blog is somewhat scary.

This is a photography blog in essence and I started it as a way to share my photography projects and the pieces that were most important to me. It’s also somewhere for people who are interested in my work to visit without having to trawl through the gigantic  amount of images on my flickr account. Enjoy!

This image is going to be included in an exciting project that’s coming up very very soon (scarily soon in fact) in Fitzroy, Melbourne. The working title at the moment is San Telmo. I can’t tell you much more at the moment. but soon I will be able to!