Lost in al-Andalus

“Photography is essentially about the play of light and dark, illumination and shadow, much as the spiritual journey and our life pilgrimage are a practice of attending to these elements of our lives and how the holy is revealed in each."
— Christine Valters Paintner
Water, Wind, Earth & Fire

The photographs in this collection are drawn from two weeks in Andalucía, a special trip of sorts with my friend Lindsey. Full-colour versions, along with entries from my contemporaneous trip journal (lightly edited for organization, but otherwise preserved in their embarrassingly sincere, vulnerable entirety) are presented in the posts that follow. Almost from the moment I set foot in Málaga, I knew that I wanted to shoot a black/white project in southern Spain. Perhaps it was the visual impact of the place: the clarity of the Mediterranean sunlight that followed us the entire time, the interplay of geometric forms, strong architecture, narrow streets, light against grit and shadow. Perhaps it was the history of the place: deeply-woven, integral to the sense of being here, the centuries of culture and conquest bleeding into the present-day, imbuing it with a certain timelessness. Perhaps it was me, and the special significance of this trip for me. As soulful and restorative as my recent-year travels for landscape photography have been, these two weeks were rejuvenating in another way entirely. The seemingly endless days - of sunlight, staying up late, strolling the streets, and relaxing in peaceful silence - brought me back to a younger moment in my life, when I was less concerned about creating than feeling, more fearless, more receptive to the world and the people around me. It brought me back to a past self that wandered the streets of Guadalajara, or the New York City boroughs, or San Francisco, or Ketchikan, with a tiny pocket camera, everywhere to love, and nothing to lose. For all these reasons, I wanted to try a style of photography that I haven’t seriously practiced since years ago in Baltimore (and perhaps it shows). I’ve organized this collection into four groups:

  • Street Photography: Architecture and street scenes both modern and old, from Málaga, Ronda, Seville, Córdoba, and Granada

  • The Albaicín: A special collection focused on Granada and the Albaicín; the place where I most felt the soul of Al-Andalus, such as it survives today

  • Humans of Al-Andalus: Photographs that take people as their main subject, myself and L included

  • Natural Forms: Expressions of beauty, man-made and otherwise

Enjoy. -J

“The streets are narrow, with strange broken stairways, undulating tentacles that twist and turn wearily, capriciously, reaching little viewpoints from which the vast snowy spines of the mountains are seen, or the splendid, definitive harmony of the plain. In some parts, the streets are strange pathways of fear and ominous disquiet, bound in walls blanketed with jasmine. We hear the barking of dogs, and distant voices calling someone in tones of hopeless sensuality… to traverse these streets is to observe fearful contrasts of mysticism and desire.”
—Federico García Lorca
Impresiones y Paisajes

“It is deep, truly deep, deeper than any well, deeper than the seas of the world, deeper even than the hearts of those that create it presently and the voices of those who sing it, because it is almost infinite. It comes from a faraway people, crossing beyond the cemetery of the years. It comes from the first tear and the first kiss.”
 —Federico García Lorca
Granada, February 19th, 1922

“It is as if we are to learn that a clear and beautiful pattern in our own lives, once understood, can then be found clear and resurgent in the world. It is a portrait of the way our lives might be part of an enveloping life, the way the world might offer a common and beautiful unity.”
— Steven Nightingale
Granada: A Pomegranate in the Hand of God

Days 1-2: Costa del Sol

“My heart gets dizzy. It is the most difficult photograph I have tried to take so far: up the scaffolding, hand over hand and out onto the pinnacles, her hair like a sail, leaning out over the tiny city, its clockwork shadows so crazily far below. She kisses him on the shoulder in the Moorish custom. They look at one another. They look into the light. They jump. There is no question I covet that conversation. There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of a bridge. I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth: would you cross that bridge if you came to it?”

— Anne Carson (1950- )
Plainwater


Málaga, May 20th 2025
Hotel Molina Lario
For the second trip in as many months, I'm trying to journal contemporaneously. It's a practice I used to have in my younger years of travel, when the days felt longer, the photography more simple, the experience less about describing and more about feeling the place. Back in the days of flip-phone, notebook, paper. My worst fears haven't materialized yet; I haven't buried myself tip-tap typing on my smartphone and forgotten to look up. Rather, I find that writing them out allows me to organize my thoughts, to reflect more deeply and vividly about what is happening in my life and my surroundings, to consider why I'm here.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm here. I'm checked into my fifth-floor hotel room (coincidentally room 520, as in the date today) in the old city center of Málaga, just a few feet down the street from the main entrance of the enormous, Renaissance-era cathedral that stands prominent against the city skyline. Waiting to meet up with Lindsey and Elyse (my co-fellows and friends, whom I last saw 1.5 years and 3 months ago respectively). They’re freshening up upstairs. It's early Tuesday evening in Spain, after a hellish eighteen hours of travel (since mid-afternoon EST yesterday) involving a tarmac collision between a luggage trolley and the starboard engine of our fully boarded Airbus red-eye flight to Paris; a confusing de-planing process (flight full of Bostonians in crisis mode with a crew yelling instructions in French or incredibly-accented English); and a hastily rebooked same-day flight two hours later through Switzerland. Leaving behind the crowd of panicking passengers clamoring for customer service, I was able to walk fifty feet down the terminal and sit down at my new departure gate, thanks to remote support from Mission Control (Jane on her laptop at home, Jordan rambling about trains and trash trucks in the background). Never a great plane sleeper, I had a brief snooze in the Zurich Airport earlier this morning, but my eyes still feel like lead weights.

My favorite moment of the day (so far) has been the brief commuter-train ride from the airport into the city center. In the sleep-deprived, vaguely awestruck calm that I associate nostalgically with being post-call during residency, I gazed out the train windows. Senses heightened and extra-attuned to look for beauty amidst the chaos (of sleep deprivation), I took in a bizarrely familiar landscape - sun-soaked chaparral, coastal plain, urban sprawl - paired with the equally bizarre experience of being in a new place for the first time. I'm comfortable being surrounded by Spanish, but the accents here are different. The people are more stately, more collected, more vaguely European than the bus and train compatriots I rode with in Mexico. The sights and smells are different, and the sounds of the city that waft through my window from the street below are intoxicating. It's a pheromonic experience, being in a new country. I hear bells pealing around the corner. From my room window, a view tucked between buildings, and a faint glimmer of the Atlantic Ocean not too far away, beyond what looks like a port and a cruise ship terminal. Truly, the region lives up to its name, the famous Costa del Sol.

Back to why I'm here. Lindsey orchestrated this one, technically. I suppose I play the part of the willing accomplice. It's a birthday trip for her, or a rather special vacation; one is unsure of the preferred nomenclature. She and Elyse have been here since the weekend; I'll overlap with Elyse just this evening; and Lindsey and I will continue gallivanting through Andalucía for the better part of this week and next week, joined by her parents partway through in Seville. So it's a family thing, or a friend thing, or a celebratory thing, or a thing that can't be bothered with definition.  Se acostumbra a eso (lack of definition) after awhile. Downstairs at check-in, I tried carrying on with the receptionist in Spanish, but he quickly and politely guided us into English. I imagine I'll get used to this over the coming days. Thank you but no, you can stop that please. One trusts that effort and intention count on some level.

I’m certainly feeling mixed about being away from home, missing another week-plus with wife and boy. I miss them already. And yet, I know I need to be here this week. Jane and I have been talking about this a lot. When I say ‘this’, I am gesticulating broadly, through the screen, at just about everything in my general vicinity. We have been on a bit of a journey in recent months, sometimes individually, sometimes together, to more carefully define or re-define what ‘this’ all means: how we relate to each other, how we live, what we build, what we ask of each other. I’m still struggling to be vulnerable and authentic in my primary relationship (cloaked as it is in the structures and mores of 17 years of long-term life-building), but I am grateful that at least we’ve been able to have conversations about the big picture. For now, the big picture means trying to recapture some of our individuality amidst the rigors of co-parenting, co-living, co-financing, co-careering, so forth. It means recognizing that our priorities have evolved, will continue to evolve, over the years and decades, and we can choose whether and how to support each other through the evolution. The alternative is to remain an amorphous married blob. Amorphous married blob is comfortable, but it is not love. It feels nice, this year, to be making choices about love with some intentionality, rather than stumbling through life with a restless soul and my heart exposed. I’d gotten quite used to the latter. “I wear my heart on my sleeve; I keep my sleeve to myself,” I believe I wrote in an essay in 2020.

I'm showered, in clean (non-airport) clothes, fully recumbent. I message Lindsey to let her know that I'm going to close my eyes before we go out, and to wake me up if I don't respond to texts. That's just in case, though. Tired though I am (and sincerely looking forward to crashing later tonight), I know I won’t fall asleep yet. I'm too excited to see this place, maybe get a sense of what I've been missing.

“But I could not sleep that night and I got up and sat in a chair and looked out of the window and I could see the square in the moonlight where the lines had been and across the square the trees shining in the moonlight, and the darkness of their shadows, and the benches bright too in the moonlight, and the scattered bottles shining, and beyond the edge of the cliff where they had all been thrown. And there was no sound but the splashing of the water in the fountain and I sat there and I thought we have begun badly.”

— Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
For Whom The Bell Tolls


Ronda, May 21st 2025
Poolside, Parador de Ronda
Costa del Sol indeed. An impressively balmy, cloudless afternoon here in Ronda. I'm drying off in the sun after taking a few laps in the little outdoor hotel pool, situated a hundred feet away from the drop into El Tajo, the breathtaking gorge of the Guadalevín River. To our south, the land opens into an idyllic landscape: rolling hills, olive plantations, orange trees. Farms, villages, the expected steeples in all the right places. The sierra beyond, blue in the distance, rugged but peaceful. The perfect backdrop. It has been a little while since I had a good swim. The hotel pool is so cold that it takes my breath away each time I push off the wall. I'm reminded of our old family home in California, summer hours spent floating in the round, overly-designed concrete pool, the centerpiece of an award-winning backyard (indeed, there was a local garden association plaque that hung on the downstairs corridor between the living room and the garage). Dodging decaying plant matter and drowning bees, sitting on the hot brick tiles at the water's edge, shivering in the full-blown faux-Mediterranean sun.

It's quiet here by the pool, even though the tourist throng is still clearing up on the Puente Nuevo just beyond the hotel yard, around the corner. Ronda is a beautiful, picturesque town of white-washed houses built into the terraces and cliffs on either side of El Tajo, the Old Town on one side, the new district on the other. It was Lindsey's idea to come here, and I tell her it was a great choice. I love places like this, where you can wander the streets, stare into an abyss, and tell with a glance the stories that people have been living with for generations. I imagine the farming communities in the valley beyond, a sequence of Roman and then Visigothic and then Moorish and then Castilian settlers, building ever upward and closer to the gorge, carving their planked walkways into the cliffside to draw water from the river below, their houses finally hopping across the chasm altogether. First the little old Roman-era stone bridge upriver from here, then a bigger bridge, then finally the biggest bridge of all, a 250-year-old, double-span arch over the top of the cliffs (to replace a hastily-built single-arch bridge that collapsed as quickly as it came up in 1741, killing fifty). We have a terrific place for the night, with what might be the best view in the entire city: a big corner room in the Parador de Ronda, with two balconies, one looking onto the Puente Nuevo, and the other facing toward the mountains. The hotel itself, situated in the town square next to the bridge, used to be the local ayuntamiento (city hall). On our two-hour ride through the region from Málaga, the train-car mostly empty on this mid-week regional route, I tell Lindsey about Ernest Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War; his part-historical retelling of fascist leaders and local landowners cornered by a leftist mob in the ayuntamiento; how they were marched from the building, summarily executed by beating, and thrown one-by-one off the cliff edge. A charming and romantic place to spend the night. Unbeatable views, with a faint lingering trace of violent revolution.

After our night in Málaga (wine, tapas and gelato with Elyse; a few pleasant hours catching up on life while the two of them showed me around the city center and its blooming jacaranda trees), Lindsey and I woke early this morning to catch our train, grabbing croissants and coffee at the station. After arriving in Ronda and checking in before noon, we spent the mid-day having a light lunch on a terrace patio beside the bridge, strolling around the Old Town, and walking the switchbacks down to the mouth of the gorge - for the views from below. It’s been more than a fine day, as any day would be that involves drinking ajo blanco and tinto, wearing hard hats, and wandering medieval cobblestone streets. After a few hours melding our bodies into the lounge chairs by the pool, we’ll have dinner in the hotel and (I presume) take a look-around at sunset. Even in full sun, I’m freezing in my wet swimwear. I might head up to our room to shower and close my eyes for a few minutes. Jet lag caught me hard last night; my body went to bed at 10 PM, took a nap, and snapped fully awake at midnight. Tired as I am, I’m in my happy place here, basking and writing and enjoying Lindsey’s companionate silence. I think I wrote something relatively recently about desirable qualities in a travel partner, but it seems inane to repeat them here, so I won’t.

Speaking of desirable qualities, I’ve spent some time reflecting on the general notion (at least as far as Other People are concerned) and have decided I know very little about what I consider desirable. There are minimum requirements, yes. Peace with self, a desire to do good, ability to hold and share emotion. Beyond that? A great blue pale, very little direction. No map or astrolabe or compass. I feel like an empty vessel, a ship awaiting ballast and sail. “I’m a soul in wonder,” sings Van Morrison; one is tempted to reproduce the lyrics to “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart” in their entirety. Words do feel inadequate, sometimes. So I just bask in the sun, mostly in silence.

Days 3-4: Seville, Pt 1

¡Ay, amor // Oh, love
que se fue y no vino! // that left and did not return!
Guadalquivir, alta torre // Guadalquivir, high tower
y viento en los naranjales… // and wind in the orange groves…
Lleva azahar, lleva olivas, // Take orange blossom, take olives,
Andalucía, a tus mares. // Andalusia, to your seas.
¡Ay, amor // Oh, love
que se fue por el aire! // that vanished into the air!

— Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)
from “Poema del Cante Jondo”


Seville, May 22nd 2025
Poolside, abba Sevilla Hotel
This will be the trip that is entirely journaled by the fucking pool. We are two hours further to the northwest, having ridden by bus from the mountains of Ronda to the plains of Seville mid-day today. Last night was amazing. I slept hard and woke just before dawn, tried to get out of bed and onto the balcony without waking Lindsey, probably failed. Sitting outside in the early morning chill, I worked the scene handheld, taking long shots and panoramas with camera propped carefully between my lap and the railing. Ronda is unbelievably beautiful before and after its mid-day hubbub of tour buses and tour groups, and I’m glad we decided to stay overnight, though there were many other places in Andalucía we could have gone. I look out over miles of landscape and it’s all so quiet, but for the wind, and some songbird I don’t recognize. The sun comes creeping up behind me and splashes light onto the mountains, then the hilltops, the little line of trees on the far ridge. It’s magical. After climbing back into bed and falling asleep again (both of us having a very slow start to the day), we roll out to a terrific hotel breakfast (fresh fruits, yogurt, local cheeses; Lindsey introduces me to pan y tomate). We take another walk around the Old Town (browsing shops of textiles and trinkets) before collecting our bags and walking the kilometer to the bus depot. Lindsey stops in a print shop along the way, acquires an ink etching of Ronda made by a local artist.

The intercity bus ride, that lovely thing I both have and haven’t missed from my younger years. I doze off next to Lindsey although the incredible views beyond the window - the passing landscapes, the checkerboard pattern of the olive groves, the mountainous valleys of the region, the little steepled villages that would evoke New England if they weren’t so stereotypically Spanish - try their best to keep me awake. I keep telling Lindsey I wish we could get off and walk around some of these places we’re passing by in a blur - they look so peaceful, so banal and beautiful. I’m a soul in wonder - or is it wander?

In Seville, it’s a hot afternoon as we step out of the bus station at La Plaza de Armas, and we opt for a pricey taxi ride around the periphery of the city center and then onto narrow winding streets to our hotel, located centrally in the Plaza de la Encarnación, a huge square towered over by Las Setas: large, oddly geometric, mushroom-shaped installations that light up at night and cost fifteen euros per person to ascend for a skyline view. Thankfully, we have an equivalent or better view of the city from the rooftop of our hotel, another solid (joint but Lindsey says we’re doing it so we’re doing it) decision. One figures if we come up to the rooftop pool every day this week (four days in a row), that’s basically thirty euros saved each time. The cost of the hotel room seems paltry after some basic multiplication and subtraction. We’ve just finished taking a long walk through Seville’s historic center, down as far as the impressive gardens at the Parque Maria Luisa and the architecturally spectacular Plaza de España. Two days into our joint trip together, and we’ve shared some fantastic meals and seen some very cool places already. My goodness, the tomatoes. The tomatoes. Already I’m picking up inspirations - and outright recipes - that I want to try recreating at home.

Seville’s historic center is distinctly cosmopolitan, even compared to the posh seaside airs of Málaga. The awning-shaded streets, the twisting winding alleys, the bars, the shops, the window displays. This is a city you could get happily lost in for hours by just picking a cardinal direction and walking. The last time I shot this much architecture, and partook in so much street photography, was probably in Guadalajara, age 19 going on 20. “That was how I learned to love a place,” my poem from that summer reads; it’s taken me awhile to rediscover the feeling. The jacarandas are in bloom, the orange trees fragrant with fruit, the bougainvilleas colorful and beautiful and perfectly entwining on stucco walls and archways. Between the crowds of shoppers and strollers and tourists and city folk just lounging around enjoying their Thursday in a way that is almost hard to imagine through work- and time-obsessed American eyes, Lindsey and I move around, taking it all in. Lindsey chides me for walking too quickly on the way home (“Your American is showing,” she says from a few steps back); I tell her it’s hot and I have an evening date with this rooftop pool.

Nearly sunset now by the pool. The light looks beautiful on the cathedral, its tall bell tower. The swifts are circling overhead, whirling through the air as dusk approaches. Like them, we’ll need to find dinner somewhere in the city down below. Not yet. A few more minutes.

Seville, May 23rd 2025
Poolside, again, abba Sevilla Hotel
I’ve been thinking recently about love as a guiding force in my life. Truth is, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in love with something or someone. An inveterate romantic, I’ve been continuously in love, had a serious crush, and/or in a committed relationship as far back as I can trace. At age nine, I proposed to a classmate with an actual diamond ring (my parents played along; must have found the whole thing exceedingly hilarious) and married her at our elementary school’s annual carnival day. After we got hitched and had our photos taken at the wedding booth, her friends and mine donated tickets to throw us a reception with pizza (by the slice) and soda (by the cup). At age eleven, the person I would consider my first love. At age thirteen, a series of pen-pals halfway around the world (the advent of the Internet) who remained platonic, but whom I loved nevertheless as friends and adoptive siblings. At age fourteen, a long-term girlfriend. At age sixteen, I met Jane; ten years later, married her. And I probably had many little crushes before nine, and have certainly had bigger crushes since adulthood. All to say - there is a core of yearning for connection that has existed as a through-line since childhood, and I have never been able to adequately explain it. It doesn’t come from a place of loneliness or fear of being alone, although there have certainly been lonely times. It doesn’t come from a place of insecure attachment or insecurity of self; looking at myself from the outside, I feel very loving and caring of this man, and very proud of the kind, complicated, thoughtful idiot he has become. Goodness knows it doesn’t come from sex or physical desire — I increasingly identify as demisexual, especially as I age. So I don’t know why it’s there. All I know is that the love seems to multiply, seems to flow and overflow, the older that I get and the more life experiences I rack up. I have tried to transmute it into many forms and direct it into many channels through the decades, through my roles as a father, a husband, a palliative care physician, a mentor, a concerned citizen, a trusting friend, a gatherer and teller of stories, a seer and revealer of art. One could say that love has driven a lot of my life-work, and the lion’s share of any success or accomplishment. And still, always there is more. Sometimes it comes through in an expansive, peaceful feeling. Sometimes it feels like this mortal shell could burst. Right now, a little bit of both.

Lindsey’s parents joined us this morning, fresh off their transatlantic overnight flight. I’ve never met her dad, and I haven’t seen her mom in nearly five years - although it feels like I’ve known them for awhile. In-person, they’re goofy, kind, and generous - like Lindsey. After breakfast (I had some real trouble waking up this morning), they drop their bags off in our room, and we take them for a saunter around the city while they await their check-in time. It’s another sunny, bluebird day here in southern Spain. We range down to the Torre del Oro on the banks of the Guadalquivir River before cutting back into the alleys and courtyards surrounding the royal palace, her dad slowly melting into a sleepy sightseeing pile. We head back to the hotel; they’re hopefully catching up on sleep downstairs now.

The sun is impressive today, and our tiny round rooftop pool offers nowhere to hide from it. I’ve been jumping in every so often - oddly enough, Lindsey and I are the only ones up here right now, in the heat of mid-day - letting the cold saltwater wash away my thoughts and clear my head. I used to have this problem where I couldn’t relax, even on vacation. The checklists, the stratagems, the intricacies of modern working life would keep on coming, always reminding me of the next thing, the real world, this break from reality. There was one solo staycation in Massachusetts, in 2022, that I ended two days early because I couldn’t stand it any longer. That has faded a lot recently, and I’m not sure what changed. Life is just as busy and complex as it ever was. Maybe I’m getting better at letting go. Maybe I’ve finally completed my transformation into the emotionally available robot, able to compartmentalize and rest and re-tool and re-execute on a dime. Or maybe love dwarfs many other things in life, makes them seem kind of smaller, and sweeter, and silly. Whatever it is, I’m blissed out here on this fucking rooftop. God, was this worth it.

We’re falling into a familiar pattern now, la vida tapa. Up late, doing little, savoring everything like wine. My skin is beginning to revert from New England pearl toward its younger swim-team bronze. A few hours here, then a shower, and rest. An evening walk later. Dinner maybe.