Street Life: Granada in Photos
Tue, Jan 12, 2010
Granada, the great Sultan of Nicaragua, is an endlessly photogenic locale. But not because it’s pretty…
Most casual visitors like to train their lenses on the city’s brightly painted colonial facades – all a carefully crafted sham of reconstruction and restoration (Granada has been sacked and burned to ashes many times since its inception).
Others frame their shots by the shifting moods of Volcán Mombacho – Granada’s melodramatic mountainous backdrop. Others make rounds of stone monuments, capturing fallen heroes and weathered sculptures of historic import.
But truly, Granada’s street life is a far richer photographic subject than any mountain, statue or work of architecture.
A visit to the Plaza Central – the shaded and often shady geographic heart of Granada – reveals a world of transitory shoe-shiners, strolling lovers, families, wanderers, old gentlemen in repose and endless vendadores and impromptu cooks firing up their carbón and cooking pots.
The spectre of the city market – a visceral and unrelentingly shambolic locale – provides yet more material for those street photographers willing and brave enough to depart from the conventional. Gritty, dirty and charged with teeming energy, Granada’s most crowded public space supplies untold unusual and fleeting scenes that just beg to be captured.
The result, we hope, are images that more accurately reflect the spirit and life of the city than the tired old stock photos gracing the brochures and guidebooks.
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Tags: market, PHOTOGRAPHY, plaza, street
Hi – very moving and colourful pictures – I hope some of them will be reproduced in the guide books. The young girl is just gorgeous. Keep up the good work.
Terri Wright