v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Paris 2007

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Business Trip to Paris

Infrared in Peru

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- In Lima's San Isidro district looking down into the Pacific

Biography

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Singapore Botanic Gardens

So truth to this photograph is semi-strange. I had just had a long conversation with a gentleman who sported some big, powerful cameras at the Singapore Botanical Gardens. He was admiring mine and was questioning my shooting practice. I told him the truth. The camera I had was adjusted to take Infrared fotos. It was an ideal context at these garden and I was looking so much for this opportunity. The day was hot and I was lugging two other cameras. The lighting however was perfect. He congratulated me and said I should visit the other gardens in Singapore. Delighted with the encounter I walked over to a varied patch of vegetation and took the above. It was then that my camera indicate I had no more battery life and I knew my replacements were dry.

Singapore Sights

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - The Flyer

There is an element of luck to find yourself on assignment in 2019 in Singapore. Especially during the period when the Mueller report is released and the worst of American politics is on display. The country/city state is modern and harbors a wealth of ethnicities and cultures that make you thrive. Though I've spent the bulk of my time working and providing my services to a young start-up there has been good time to walk about thanks to the good graces of my temporary employer. Outside of the overpowering heat that descends during noon hours this is very habitable city with much to do. With another week here I hope to post some of thoughts and photographs of this great space.

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Chinatown on Saturday

Monasterio/Convento Santa Catalina en Arequipa

Vallejo Nocturo 2019 -El Monasterio de Santa Catalina en Arequipa en Febrero 2019

From Wikipedia:

The foundress of the monastery was a rich widow, Maria de Guzman. The tradition of the time indicated that the second son or daughter of a family would enter a life of service in the Church, and the monastery accepted only women from upper class Spanish families. Each family paid a dowry at their daughter's admission to the monastery. The dowry expected of a woman who wished to enter as a choir nun--indicated by wearing a black veil—and who thereby accepted the duty of the daily recitation of the Divine Office, was 2,400 silver coins, equivalent to about $150,000 (U.S.) today. The nuns were also required to bring 25 listed items, including a statue, a painting, a lamp and clothes. The wealthiest nuns may have brought fine English china and silk curtains and rugs. Although it was possible for poorer nuns to enter the convent without paying a dowry, it can be seen from the cells that most of the nuns were very wealthy.

In 1871 Sister Josefa Cadena, O.P., a strict Dominican nun, was sent by Pope Pius IX to reform the monastery. She sent the rich dowries back to Europe, and freed all the servants and slaves, giving them the choice of either remaining as nuns or leaving. In addition to the stories of outrageous wealth, there are tales of nuns becoming pregnant, and amazingly of the skeleton of a baby being discovered encased in a wall. This, in fact, did not happen in Santa Catalina, and there are rumors of the same story in the nearby Santa Rosa monastery, as well.

At its height, the monastery housed approximately 450 people (about a third of them nuns and the rest servants) in a cloistered community. In the 1960s, it was struck twice by earthquakes, severely damaging the structures, and forcing the nuns to build new accommodation next door. It was then restored in stages by groups including Promociones Turisticas del Sur S.A. and World Monuments Fund and opened to the public. This also helped pay for the installation of electricity and running water, as required by law.

Red

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Rio Flower

Santa Teresa Perspective

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Street Fare

The Right Shot

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - In Brazil, at a wedding

At Siem Reap

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- Craft at Siem Reap 2009

A kind of nobility

 

 

V.S. Naipaul recently passed away, an article from NYRB by Ian Buruma. I enjoyed Naipul's fiction when I was young-in my thirties. He appeared to me to be clear and cryptic at the same time about topics that hounded me. Bend of the River I considered a masterpiece for its detatchment and depth. But then sometime in the mid 80"s I stopped reading him and never had the will to go back to him. But there was probably more as he was an impeccable writer :

V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin, in 1991, when he was feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine-art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.)

This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work himself up into a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.

Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness (1964), he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches Naipaul’s shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man wishes to hitch a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No, let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, “the visit ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”

It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.

These raw nerves did not make him into an apologist for empire, let alone for the horrors inflicted by white Europeans. On the contrary, he blamed the abject state of so many former colonies on imperial conquest. In The Loss of Eldorado (1969), a short history of his native Trinidad, he describes in great detail how waves of bloody conquest wiped out entire peoples and their cultures, leaving half-baked, dispossessed, rootless societies. Such societies have lost what Naipaul calls their “wholeness” and are prone to revolutionary fantasies and religious fanaticism.

Wholeness was an important idea to Naipaul. To him, it represented cultural memory, a settled sense of place and identity. History was important to him, as well as literary achievement upon which new generations of writers could build. It irked him that there was nothing for him to build on in Trinidad, apart from some vaguely recalled Brahmin rituals and books about a faraway European country where it rained all the time, a place he could only imagine. England, to him, represented a culture that was whole. And, from the distance of his childhood, so did India. (In fact, he knew more about ancient Rome, taught by a Latin teacher in Trinidad, than he did about either country.)

When he finally managed to go to India, he was disappointed. India was a “wounded civilization,” maimed by Muslim conquests and European colonialism. He realized he didn’t belong there, any more than in Trinidad or in England. And so he sought to find his place in the world through words. Books would be his escape from feeling rootless and superfluous. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, had tried to lift himself from his surroundings by writing journalism and short stories, which he hoped, in vain, to publish in England. Writing, to father and son, was more than a profession; it was a calling that conferred a kind of nobility.

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