As Texas reels once more from a reliance on faith over science, my image, Signs of Life, refers not to the re-opening of the Texas economy but to a demolition site in Alicante, Spain.
As I wandered the streets, camera in hand, my mind just buzzed with questions.
Taken in March 1999, my wife and I were on a break from paris. So far, that remains my only trip to Spain.
Like any modern city with a storied history, urban renewal was continuing apace. Signs of Life was shot in one of the streets near the Concatedral d'Alacant Sant Nicoloau de Bari (website in Spanish).
I wondered at the lives that have been lived in this now vacant space. Who were these people? Where did they go? What was life like for the neighbors on the far side of the walls? Did they feel secure with the abutting building now gone?
I couldn't then and can't today make out exactly what the designs on the walls are.They could either be a paneling design or perhaps, more likely, the remnants of kitchen cabinets, stuck against the walls.
I was struck by the vertical alignment – another element that suggests a standard layout to the now-gone apartments and implying kitchen for shared services that would have run in now removed vertical conduits.
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Image Processing
I took this image from street level at an oblique angle. In 1999 I was shooting film.
For this image I:
- Scanned the original image with a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED
- Warped the image in Adobe Photoshop to transform from the original, oblique, street view to the normalized view presented here
- Performed some noise reduction and localized sharpening using Topaz Studio 2
- Applied some tonal contrast using NIK Color Efex
- Painted some additional clarity on the brickwork in Adobe Lightroom Classic
Image Processing:
- Simple adjustments in Adobe Lightroom
- Color adjustments in NIK Color Efex Pro 5 by DxO
- Additional adjustments in Adobe Photoshop
Camera
Like my prior post, I would have taken this on a Canon EOS5 (A2E) in the United States.
The lens was probably the Canon 28-135 that was my go-to general purpose lens back then.
