This is a series from Southern Spain —Granada, Seville, the Alpujarra range, the coast at Nerja, and Cordoba. I was traveling to meet a colleague at a film conference, and spent a week exploring this magical region, Andalusia, alone. I had a recently broken heart. I think that brought a heightened awareness, a kind of hyper vigilance, to my eye. Perhaps the photos have something sorrowful, hungry, and of course, downcast, in them. Taking the title from the photo of a mural that has the Spanish word for sky, ‘Cielo’, scrawled above the horizon, these pictures formed an exhibition at Rapp Optical gallery in Toronto called Andalusia: Sin Cielo (no sky).

Andalusia is the heart of Moorish Spain, where for some 800 years (710 to 1480) lslam held sway. By 1200, the vast majority of Iberia’s 7 million inhabitants, nearly all born there (now Spain and Portugal), were Muslim. In the Middle Ages, Cordoba was a magnet for the finest minds of the known world and burned like a torch in the gloom. After the first convulsions of Reconquesta in the 1200s, the Moorish Kingdom of Granada continued for three more centuries. The cathedrals of Cordoba and Seville have mosque architectural details and orange groves within them, and thankfully the delicate, transcendent wonders of the Alhambra Palace in Granada were not destroyed when Christendom established its hegemony in Europe and the Spanish Inquisition followed.

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Train station, Amsterdam (Photo by Chris Lowry)

Many of us enjoy traveling to far-off places – usually by air – sometimes for only a weekend. Southern Ontario attracts large numbers of visitors arriving by plane. Heck, they just expanded Pearson Airport to accommodate increasing traffic. It’s normal, it’s a way of life that’s taken for granted…and it probably won’t last much longer.
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