On Rainy Days

There's something magical about the way that reality is presented to us through the rain. The world as we see it is no longer as we used to know it on sunny days. The rain changes the way we move through space and also the way we exist in the space itself. Choices are to be made when it rains, protection becomes the priority. More than in any other weather conditions we become aware of our surroundings and of what can serve us as circumstantial shelter. We gain conscience of the architecture of the town in terms of its functionality against the rain. The whole town turns into something else in terms of form and function as if the rain works as some kind of shape shifting trigger.

There's something magical about the way the street photographer manage to mingle amongst people in the streets and captures its moves through the rain, combining all the elements in the scene in a powerful cinematic scenery of a potential motion picture that we, the viewers, project in our heads from the photo's stillness of blurred characters and places. Rainy days emerge as a possibility of an intimate dialogue between what the photographer sees through the camera and what we are able to feel from the fixated image beyond the curtain of rain. In this sense, each photo is much more than meets the eye and the rain provides a passage to a different dimension of reality entering new scales and contexts of space, architecture and everyday life.

Most of the characters walking the streets of rain are faceless. They have umbrellas instead. It's not difficult to the viewer to unconsciously identify with those characters facing the ground and holding strengths against the weather, in our attempt to inscribe our humanity in the urban landscape as the living part of the architecture reshaped by the rain through dramatic angles and scales of grey, as if we inevitably decode rain sceneries as a metaphor of living through adversity.

Using the urban structure as prime matter and matching drops of rain and people in it, the street photographer creates a new path through the town. The rain is not to be seen as an obstacle to everyday life but, most of all, as a challenge that compels us to go further, even with eyes on the ground, keeping in mind the sky above reflected on wet pavement.

Ana Barquina – 30.Maio.2016