Favorite Places thru the Lens |
Discovering And Remembering LimaSome years ago, on a first trip to Lima, Peru, I found one of my favorite places. A little alley, hidden away between two side streets, filled with postage stamp size sidewalk cafes. Each cafe offered no more than 3 wooden fold-up tables, although built for two people, often serving four or more lunch partners. Each one had a giant sandwich board in front with the day's offerings, which were pretty much all the same as the next place, but offered 20 or so typical Peruvian lunch plates. They all included an herbal or fruit drink and a first course of soup, salad or some other Peruvian specialty. Most lunches leaned heavily on rice and potatoes but provided nourishment enough to get you through the afternoon and then some. The cost for the complete meal was 7 or 8 Peruvian soles, about two and a half U.S. dollars at the time.
A couple of years later, after moving permanently to the city, I walked to "my" alley, only to discover the entrance had been walled off to deny access. The one lonely cafe still there, accessible from the street on the other end of the alley, disappeared the following week. My secret lunch place was to be next in the never-ending destruction of the old neighborhoods to make way for yet another cookie cutter high rise apartment building. Thus began my compulsion to photograph everything around me - before it disappeared. The world through my lens often looks different than what I've seen before. The act of looking at things as photography, or art, forces me to see things that I may not have noticed without the camera. |