Not many things possess the same level of constancy as the landscape of my region. The farthest expanses have remained unaltered since the first time I saw them. The idiosyncrasy lies in the fact that its pace is much slower than I am capable of appreciating, our relationship works because of that. It remains the same while I tend to be changing.
As a child, I savored the mountains and meadows of my Basque Country. Many of my memories are with my aunt, my sister, and my cousins, as we explored small villages or walked along the cliffside routes that border our coast. Back then, the flowers still towered above our waist. It was boundless, akin to the playground – a place devoid of commitment to immerse oneself.
Over the past decade, prolonged absences have punctuated our connection, with some intervals extending beyond a year. However, it reserves a spot on a cliff where I know every tree and the paths that lead me back to it. I have delved into it through its details, colors, textures and scenery in photographs, writings, and shared experiences. Perhaps it’s this ongoing endeavor that ensures it never truly ends. Is an inattentive and distracted interlocutor, and that’s the kind of relationship it offers.
Time has transformed this ensemble of shapes into a conversational companion with whom I’ve established an open dialogue, someone to walk in silence with. In addition to capturing it through photography, one hopes to grasp the pace at which it unfolds. Within its nature, explore its innate ability to provide you with a recognizable place for merging the new experiences you’ve encountered.
In those instants of absent conversation, vague ideas emerge from its characteristic silence. Along the cliffs, within the same breach that delineates our coastline, the rock formations sculpt its stillness as the freedom of the sea. While, with a compassionate response, the sea solidifies into an unyielding, cemented promenade.
To look for something or to be found is the nature beyond most of our conversations. I come with the intention of proving what I’ve learned, but that would mean seeing it through the same eyes with which I last saw it. Each time, it becomes increasingly evident; you already know what lies on the other side of the path. You expect the padded bishop’s flower fields and the wrinkled tree that makes you bend down above the mud-covered route. Yet, as soon as I leave the road and walk on the muddy paths, I get lost on the steps I thought I knew.
Even before knowing this landscape, I felt a profound desire for coherence. I’ve never known why photography helps me to find it, nor do I urge to explain it. I suppose it’s a tool like any other, but when used, it feels capable of explaining so many things.
It replaces your usual forms of expression. You trust photography to communicate your ideas while, at the same time, serve as evidence of their existence. Even though it’s not a language meant to provide an immutable definition, one hopes it does so. And that your voice, the way you perceive information and synthesize the essence of a subject, becomes imprinted within it.
A tool created to document truth feels distant from it as it persuades you to elevate complementary elements to the main characters. It turns a tree into a green mass, lets the leaves chase each other like suckerfish or reveals the landscape through the trunk of a tree. In addition, amidst all of this, never shows, at any moment, the defined image that would preempt the understanding that this photograph indeed is a portrait about the landscape and me.
This inflection transcends the meaning of things and trivializes the plan one comes with. All that one acknowledges to be undeniably superior, undeniably more functional, is lost in the epiphany of the unknown to learn a language that gives meaning to this inattentive and distracted relationship.
Returning to a place where one is already familiar with the elements that once engrossed his attention, seeing a mountain cast in the shadow of another like if the grass was back above our waist. Understanding something more from where I come from.
