I rarely do this thing of staying in and taking dozens of photos on only one object. But this time it's "Nemesia's Window" and I've had a lot of memories watching this old window slowly decaying...
This window is just a couple of streets from my house... Nemesia was an old woman with dark skin and a sweet face, a strong but loving voice, a rough appearance but a huge heart... Anyway, from my point of view Nemesia was "a good soul"...
My memories about Nemesia date back about 1977, when I was a child of about 7 years old and my grandmother used to say to me: "Go and take a wicker basket and bring two bread pieces from Nemesia's house"... Then I would take the basket and walk the short distance to the old matron's house. There I would say: "Good morning Mrs. Nemesia, my grandmother Olimpia sends two loaves of warm bread to her" ... Then Nemesia would say: "God bless you, bring that basket here" and she would take it with her thick, tanned hands and then put the bread inside and say: "Run, don't let the bread get cold"...
At that time, Nemesia would have been about 90 years old, but her strength was something incredible and she woke up every day at 4 AM to dedicate herself to knead and bake the bread that she sold to the houses in the village. She had a beautiful oven made of mud and clay pavers inside a large space covered with metal sheets at the back of her backyard... I remember the huge piles of logs used for baking bread and the many chickens and ducks that roamed Nemesia's yard... I always wanted to stay and watch those animals, but Nemesia would make me run back to avoid the bread arriving cold on the breakfast table at my grandmother's house...
My grandmother used to say that she had known Nemesia since she was a child and Nemesia was a young girl well past her teens. My grandmother also told me that Nemesia's grandparents were slaves freed by their masters and that because of that Nemesia and her family had had a hard existence. This was because of the stigmas still persisting in the society of the early 20th century in Venezuela, even though slavery had ended more than 100 years before Nemesia was born... That's how complex society was then... My grandmother's adoptive mother (her biological mother died when she was only 6 years old) wanted to break paradigms and was a close friend of Nemesia's mother and all her family, so Nemesia and my grandmother knew each other since all their lives...
My grandmother died only about four years after these memories I share with you today. However, Nemesia was over 100 years old and died when I was a young man entering adulthood. After my grandmother died, my mother would occasionally buy bread from Nemesia... Sadly, none of her sons followed her tradition of making bread baked in wood-fired ovens... In fact, they all left the village and only one of her great-grandchildren remains in her house. But the house is in ruins and some parts have already fallen down... Even this old window looks like it will soon be completely dismantled...
The day I took all these pictures, I did it with the intention of preserving images of this old window which is part of life's memories. I also wanted to remember Nemesia, her delicious baked bread, her sweet voice, her blessings and her backyard full of colourful chickens and ducks... Those were enchanting years, it was my childhood and it was a time when I lived without worries and everything around me seemed to be taken out of one of those novels of "Latin American magical realism" that I liked to read during my adolescence...
BLACK & WHITE VERSIONS
As I usually do with many of my photographic works, I have prepared the same set of photos processed in black and white. I am doing this "for me and for you", because I know that, as photography lovers, many of us like to appreciate this in colour and also in black and white... So here are these monochrome photos, where the typical drama of things that are victims of time and neglect is highlighted...
I confess that I have been enjoying these photos very much. I have enlarged them on my monitor and have been looking at their textures for long minutes in almost all of them... This is amazing!... There is a world of shapes and things on these surfaces!...
ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The shots are then exported to JGP format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.
Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!
"We make photographs to understand what our lives mean to ourselves." - Ralph Hattersley.
Lens: Tokina ATX-PRO 100mm f/2.8 d MACRO
