Touching the sky. After the Heart of Jesus by MARÏA TUDELA

The loneliness of the Almighty

It is the birds that are high in the sky of Murcia that must look down to see God, to overfly over these representations of the divine being whose heart welcomes us without distinction: the heart of God's humanity. Open arms in cross, offering and oblation. Revealed truths, petrified theological notions dotting the incredulous landscape like menhirs, carved landmarks in an almost abandoned world; calls of silence. The scale is impressive, as the chosen place, the gesture and the face as well, but even more so, if possible, its mere presence there, ‘supernatural’, and that halo of frozen apparitions that these white and gray photographs rescue. That gray and that grain that are like the porosity of time, the prelude to disappearance, of what fades and blurs, like the fate of memories that were never entirely ours.

 

Landscapes (of Cádiz) by HUMBERTO YBARRA

Landscapes without figures

Earth stretched out, unused, the first look of the day, of the world, that first look that set up, that shapes, that names and delimits. A human gaze that cannot encompass everything and then frames and produces 'landscapes', fragments, loose and autonomous pieces that in their closed space manages to evoke infinity, near and far, here and the 'non plus ultra', and they alert us to our actually insignificant presence while facing the world. We cannot see the figure in these landscapes; He is on this side, behind the camera, on our side and beside us, looking, seeing. Watching, watching the light move, time pass and space ripple. The result is these images of the “space-time continuum” obtained, captured in Cádiz, where for a long time it was believed the world ended.

 

It is clear that in all the cases that this splendid issue of the magazine brings together, we are faced with that “observer's paradox”, that situation in which the observed phenomenon is influenced by the presence of the observer or researcher himself. It is something completely unavoidable in photography, as already said, and also on many occasions when something is sought after, premeditated. We will never be free from the insidious presence of the machine, its features, its advances, its shortcomings, its limitations, but without that small portable camera obscura, our memory less eyes would leave us practically blind living longer still locked in that anguished cavern that Plato bequeath us, limited and isolated in ourselves. Thanks, then, to photography, and thanks, above all, to those who, like our four protagonists, know how to handle these gadgets and offer us a legacy. It is now the turn of the multitude of ‘observers’ who contemplate these images, and their ‘paradoxes’ (try to let yourself go and see what there is).