My Old Window Collection by Inma Abia

On March 19^th, 2011 I arrived early in Chiclana de la Frontera, Cadiz, Spain to experience the extreme low tides caused by the Supermoon. I don't know if the tide was visibly affected by the moon on that morning or not but I was glad to be there early on that beautiful morning.

Oddly enough, there is an abandoned fishing village there named Sancti Petri which caught my attention. Ignoring the "No Trespassing" signs I started to wander the streets of old, dilapidated houses in various states of decay. As it turned out, I wasn't the only photographer to be visiting this village on that morning.

As I was shooting the lonely streets, interiors of ruined houses, and the trash left behind I became intrigued by the windows of the houses. Especially by the different objects left in the windows; batteries, socks, a funnel, ropes, waders, etc. Suddenly I found myself focused on photographing all the different windows in the village.

When I arrived at home that evening and I started to review the pictures I was a bit disappointed. I knew there was a good story there but there just seemed to be something missing.

The next day, looking at my captures with fresh eyes, I realized that it would make a wonderful composite. The visual impact of eight or more windows on a single print would bring better insight into what life must have been like in this village and what has happened to it since it was abandoned.

I ended up choosing eight windows and cropped them so they would be a uniform size. After that I adjusted contrast, brightness, and color with an eye toward emphasizing the rust on the metal bars, chipped paint of the old wood, or the multitude of repairs that were obviously made to the walls around the windows.

Initially I just placed the eight shots onto a large canvas and focused getting the grid right. After I settled on the grid, I started to look at the content of each picture; two of them were bricked up, some had different numbers of bars in them, while others had objects prominently displayed in their openings.

The first thing I thought was the two bricked up windows couldn't go together but I didn't want to place them in symmetrical positions either. After moving the pictures around to several different arrangements and spending time analyzing each both up close and from a distance while remaining focused on the emotions each arrangement evoked I finally settled on the arrangement you see here.

With the arrangement of the composition finally determined I then started to focus on the area between the windows. I knew I had to do something about the transition from window, texture, color, and background to complete the composition.

After trying several different preset frames, I finally chose a "Torn Paper" effect seen here as it really evoked an emotional response in me and seemed like the perfect finish to a rustic picture giving a glimpse into what life used to be like for fishermen in southern Spain.