Patterning Portugal

Now that summer is coming to a close, I'm reviewing the summer that was, recalling it--though so much of this summer in the northeast didn't feel much like summer at all--before letting go. One of the pleasures of my summer was traveling to Portugal for the first time, and one of the many things that will stay with me from that trip is the tile patterns, particularly in Lisbon. They're rough around the edges, imperfect, exquisite, happy, unique, falling apart but holding their beauty, tinged with lost time and nostalgia, taken for granted until they're gone . . . much like the patterning of summer days. Or maybe I'm simply reading summer into them because another one is passing, bittersweetly, like travels you long to return to after they've ended.

Nazaré

Nazaré is a seaside town on the coast of Portugal. The town used to be known more as a fishing village than a beach resort, so now it's a combination of the two, with perhaps the beaches winning out. Fresh seafood is displayed in all the restaurant windows, and packs of fisherman's wives can still be seen roaming the town in traditional dress and selling their wares while their husbands are out to sea. There's a touch of tacky honky tonk along the main drag, but the narrow residential streets haven't been much touched by tourism aside from the abundance of restaurants--many quite empty when we visited in late spring. Like many of my favorite photographic destinations, it wasn't the notable architecture that attracted me, but rather the colorful everyday details of people's lives. I tend to take dark photographs, so Nazaré was a welcome change of pace since it forced me towards a lighter, brighter palette. I loved these lived-in yet secretive (most residents were out of view) streets and would have been happy to spend days (alas, I had just one) photographing them.