Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Senor in black, senorita in red

364 days without making a single image. Why?

To make a picture you have to have something to say, at least, that’s what I need. My faith in what I am doing with a camera, whether there is any point to my image making, ebbs and flows. It ebbs more than it flows; it ebbed quite suddenly after our 2010 New Mexico trip. The tide went out a long way, making for a dry and bleak year. The flow has returned reluctantly, reserved and uncertain.

52 weeks found the family back on vacation, back in the same Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, rental property, and back visting Santa Fe for the day. Being on vacation was not enough to blow the dust off the camera; the first click of the shutter did not come for another nine days.

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More reliable than my picture taking, the Fiesta de Santa Fe has been held annually since 1712, commemorating the recapture of the town from the Pueblo indians in 1692. Early in the nine day novena cycle of masses, the Procession of La Conquestadora escorts the “oldest statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the United States” from the cathedral to the Rosario Chapel a few blocks to the west. This year’s event began as a thunderstorm dropped welcome rain on the town, temporarily washing away the smoke of the Las Conchas wild fire burning around nearby Los Alamos.

To an ignorant outsider of modern liberal education and feeling, this ceremony is a dizzying challenge, triggering multiple political correctness alarms as helmeted conquistadors and flamenco dressed senoritas march past the Native American sellers of jewelry and pots arranged along the sidewalk in front of the Governor’s Palace. The truth of the feelings of all involved, participants and witnesses is more complex and subtle than a visiting Brit tourist from Texas can grasp.

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The physicists of Los Alamos might offer a description of quarks, strange and charming, but not the why. The TV news crews may offer film at ten, but not the why. Why did I stop taking photographs for a year? Why did I start again on July 3, 2011 and what does this image mean? Who can say what anything really means or why?