Am I ever home? Well, in a sense, this is home, my place of origin. Starting a five day street photography workshop today and there couldn't be a better place. This is on West 79th Street, just down the block from the hotel where the group is staying. Today we're going to deepest Brooklyn. First stop Brighton Beach, largely Ukrainian and Russian, and then down to Coney Island. I haven't been there since I was a kid.
Spain, as westerners know, was intensely Catholic. After all, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who drove the last Muslim kingdom from Iberia and dispatched Columbus to the New World to, in the end, plunder and spread communicable disease, were known as Los Reyes Catolicos. It gave us the Spanish Inquisition. Like most of Europe, churchgoing isn't so much of a thing these days, but the monuments remain. The Toledo Cathedral is enormous and made me think about the portion of the region's resources devoted to creating it.
This hasn't been much of a St. Louis photo blog lately. It's going to get worse. I arrive in New York today for a five day street photography workshop. Home sweet home.
Toledo, Spain, has a magnificent cathedral but there are also well-preserved synagogues, as here. The city has a Jewish quarter, marked by tiles with Hebrew characters in the street. There was a time when Christian, Muslim and Jewish residents lived together in relative peace (how relative depending on who was in charge). It didn't last.
We all know about Doménikos Theotokópoulos, right? El Greco to you. Born in Crete, studied in Venice under Titian, and the primarily lived in worked in Toledo. This is one of his masterpieces, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, in the Church of Santo Tomé, Obviously, it is very complex. You can find a discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burial_of_the_Count_of_Orgaz .
One day last week we took a trip to the historic city of Toledo, about an hour south of Madrid. It's hilly, and was tough on a couple of 70-somethings. There was lots to see. The main buildings seen here on the horizon are the cathedral on the left and the Alcazar, an old military facility, on the right.
