La Luz del Pueblo—Discovering a Sense of Place in San Miguel de Allende…
San Miguel has left its mark and I wait to revisit—con amor y besos y abrazos. On returning from Oz, Dorothy said, ‘but it wasn’t a dream, it was a place.’ Yes, San Miguel is a place and it is to be enjoyed like a wonderful dream.
WORDS BY THE LATE NANCY ROTENBERG
From the Introduction to the book
La Luz del Pueblo—Discovering a Sense of Place in San Miguel de Allende
by Jeremy Woodhouse & Nancy Rotenberg, 2008
There are those places in the world that cause you to miss your flight home and ask you to consider where home is. There are those places in the world where your face begins to soften and where your soul becomes alive and no longer feels neglected. There are those places in the world where sensual awareness runs amok and where you feel it with every part of your being. As the poet Rumi wrote, you become ‘a pearl without a shell, a mindful flooding, candle turned moth, head become empty jar, bird settling nest, love lived.’ For me, San Miguel de Allende is such a place.
As a frequent visitor to bookstore travel sections, I had seen photographs of San Miguel’s rainbow-colored adobe structures and geraniums growing out of coffee tins. I had seen quirky skeletons playing guitars and I yearned to visit the place where artists and lovers, like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera received their inspiration. When back in 2005 Jeremy said let’s do a photography workshop in San Miguel de Allende, I was packed.
San Miguel is not just a place to visit like a tourist resort. It is a visceral experience where hearts and minds dare to open. San Miguel lives in the experience of senses, not in the mind – it has sabor and ambiente. Tony Cohan, On Mexican Time, writes about San Miguel. ‘Here, life is intimate, voluptuous, and sense-driven’. It is all of that and as a photographer, my mission is to transfer some of that sabor into pixels. As workshop leaders, our goal is to help other photographers transfer and record experiences and feelings to their pixels. After half a dozen trips here and many workshops later, Jeremy and I have put this book together so that you, the reader can enjoy the essence of a wonderful Mexican location, while learning how to approach a town, such as San Miguel, being prepared and ready to photograph a sense of place – con gusto.
Quite a few copies of the books remain and I am offering them at a deeply discounted price
A 180-page, full-color, hard cover book with a 4-color jacket photographed during a 3-year period over several tours to San Miguel de Allende led by Jeremy Woodhouse and the late Nancy Rotenberg. The book was published in late 2008, the year in which San Miguel was awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. It makes a wonderful souvenir for both visitors to, and residents of, this colonial jewel.
Many of the images in this blog post below appear in the book. Click on any image below for further information like what, when, who and where
Nancy Hopwood
Linda Torbert