I’ve finally got around to mixing up some chemicals and processing some rolls of film from Seville last year. It was nice to be back in the darkroom and I’m pretty pleased with the results. All images were shot of Ilford HP5 at 1600ISO with no flash…
What a great year it’s been on the Sorolla project. The first third was taken up writing scripts, organising filming permits and arranging interviews for a week-long shoot for a work-in-progress Documentary down in Sevilla during the incredible April Fair. I was joined by an amazing team and many thanks go to Phil, Jack G, Jack K, James and Tom for making things a reality - I can’t think of a better bunch of guys to work with. The rest of the year was all about translating interviews, editing shots, recording voice-overs and putting together a showreel teaser and sequence. Now begins the hard work of generating some interest and getting the full doc made which will hopefully in 2019 - the centenary of the completion of Sorolla’s masterpiece, “Vision of Spain”. Watch this space…
As March ticks by and the dust settles on 2017, I've finally got round to a look-back at last year. It's been over 5 years now on the Sorolla trail and 2017 was definitely the most action-packed one yet. I covered a few more thousand kilometres and crossed the country more than a couple of times! Photoshoots in Extremadura, Aragon and Castilla-la-Mancha were a highlight as well as a mad few days down in Seville for the April fair once more, hanging out with fighting bulls and the Matadors that face them. Corpus Christi in Valencia in the early summer heat was another standout and a reminder of how much I love that city. I rounded off the year in the palm groves of Elche in some extraordinary mediterranean winter light unique to this corner of Spain. Oh, I almost forgot, I also had the honor of exhibiting my photographs alongside some paintings of the great man himself over in Cáceres which attracted a few thousand visitors. Thanks to everyone you helped make things a reality. Let's hope 2018 brings many more surprises; I have a feeling it will....
The Fería de Abril is one of Spain's most vibrant and passionate festivals. Here is a selection of images taken both outside and inside the beating heart of this amazing spectacle...
Seville, mid-April. After an aborted trip in March for the Easter week celebrations due to a particularly bad bout of flu I'd opted for the consolation prize of the 'Fería de abril', the city's wild and exuberant week-long party and, in its colour, vibrancy, song and dance, the complete antithesis to the somber and austere Semana Santa processions.
The location for the Fería was a vast area the size of a small town which for the other 51 weeks of the year must look a bit unloved and neglected. This week, however, was different and over the next couple of hours I was to witness an unrivalled spectacle of Andalusian opulence. It was 7pm by the time I'd crossed the lazy Gaudalquiver river and made the half hour walk across the old gypsy neighbourhood of Triana to the outskirts of the city. The heat was really soporific now and I was down to a t-shirt and wishing I'd packed some shorts. On turning a final corner a huge gateway emblazoned with thousands of coloured light-bulbs towered above me, it was truly enormous. I stopped to load my cameras with film and take a breath, my heart racing. Then I dived in to forget myself in the deep end of the infinity pool of Spanish cultural delights.
Las Casetas
They say you can only really find out who you are by taking yourself out of your natural environment, your habitual habitat, and putting yourself amongst the exotic. It is impossible to measure yourself against familiarity, your surroundings and you are one and the same; a symbiosis brought about by years of routine. Take a sheep from his flock and stick him with a herd of cows and suddenly he realizes he's a sheep, he's different. This is something I've often thought about on my various travels around the world but never had this been more true than now.
As well as a huge fairground with rides and attractions, the Fería is made up of more than a thousand casetas, tent-like structures of about 30m2 serving as private gathering spaces for local families and businesses to eat, drink and dance. As I walked through the rows and rows of these private parties I felt a growing shame at my Anglo Saxon reservedness and an acute awareness of my inadequacies and abilities to let go and have fun. I was an outsider catching fleeting glimpses from the corner of my eye of a thousand moments I could never experience however much I desired it. It was wholeheartedly uplifting as well as a deft blow to my yearning to be part of something.
The next generation...
Men, women and children rode about on horseback, both beast and rider dressed in their traditional finery. Manzanilla or sherry was sipped from delicate, long-stemmed, glasses both on and off the horses by men in wide-brimmed Cordoban hats. Tight-fitting feminine dresses of all designs and colours were paraded around by dark-haired and impossibly beautiful women with flowers in their hair and horse-drawn carts carrying whole families trotted past on their way to meet friends. A timeless old, low light lit the scene adding an air of otherworldliness to the spectacle and I wandered blissfully around not wanting the moment to end.
The heat had taken me by surprise. I was wrapped up in at least two too many layers and sweat was now creating its own river system inside my clothes. I'd known it was going to be warmer, of course, but I hadn't been expecting this.
I'd flown in from Cantabria on a morning flight and the temperature was climbing steadily touching 30c by the time I was wandering over the town in search of my hostel. Seville is like an ambush on the senses; heat aside, the city creeps up and snatches you away from your perceived normality. All five senses are needed in equal measure to truly appreciate it and it is impossible to wriggle free from its grasp. Sorolla loved Seville and felt this allure keenly. He painted no fewer than four of the fourteen paintings in the Vision of Spain series in or around the city. Within an hour of landing I too shared his enthusiasm for the place; it was impossible not to.
La Giralda
I skirted around the Giralda, Seville's exotic minaret built by the Moors in the 12th century and subsequently re-appropriated by the Spanish Christians into a unique bell-tower for the second largest cathedral in all Christendom, and took a narrow side street up and around to my digs, a modest backpackers' hostel set in a wonderful 500 year old Jewish house which formed part of the 'Barrio Santa Cruz'. Balconies on three levels rose above a typical Andaluz interior patio and up top there was a two-tier roof terrace giving a sea-of-terracotta-tile view in all directions punctuated by the Giralda and other, lesser, church spires. It wasn't quite the 5-star Grand Hotel de Paris in which Sorolla had installed himself on his visits here but my top bunk in an 8-bed mixed dorm would do just fine. I freshened up, namely peeled off a few layers, and headed into the maze of cobbled streets that surrounded the hostel. I had things to do, places to find and some detective work to do. There wasn't a minute to lose...
Hot: just a typical April day in the Andalusian capital
In the spring of 1915, Sorolla was already on his third, and final, trip to the Andalusian capital as part of the Vision of Spain series. Having already painted the Easter processions in the 'Holy Week Penitents' as well as a more rural scene of horseman driving fighting bulls in the surrounding countryside in 'The Round-up', both in 1914, the artist was back in Seville to paint another two canvases, this time to depict a more cultural side to Spain in the form of Flamenco and Bullfighting. 100 years later and now here I was immersing myself in these two titans of Spanish identity. Was it all just a gimmicky, soulless and plastic facade designed to perpetuate the stereotypes and myths of a Spain viewed from the outside (and to generate more than a few tourist euros) or was there something more real, more tangible, to be grasped onto here? I needed to find out more and headed straight to Sevilla's bullring, 'La Maestranza'.
La Maestranza is widely considered to be the most important bullring in the world and certainly its oldest. The bullfighting season traditionally begins here on Easter day and the daily fights over the next week would form the first major event in the tauromachia calendar. I had a ticket for the following day's event but I wanted to get a feel for the place; I circled the building and then installed myself at the back entrance, otherwise known as 'puerta 16'. Barriers had been placed either side of it and I squeezed my way to the front. The Policía local were there to act as bodyguards and every now and then the thick red wooden gates opened and an important looking person would be allowed to enter. Stood as I was right next to these gates I was given a tantalizing glimpse into the backstage world of bullfighting.
'Puerta 16'
This was real. Standing there for the best part of an hour as the crowd grew it struck me just how similar this was to being backstage at a rock concert, waiting for your favourite band or musician to waltz past and perhaps get their autograph or a photo with them. When the Matadors and their entourage finally arrived there was a definite aura of the rich and famous about them. Phones snapped away, immortalizing the moment, women shouted 'hola guapo!' and suited men with slicked-back oiled hair looked on in a haze of pride whilst the bullfighters purposely and self-confidently strode past and out of sight through the heavy wooden doors and into the bowels of Seville's great bullring. I would be back tomorrow and, with the rest of the local crowd, wandered off in the general direction of the Fería, the epicentre of the celebrations.
