BD Photography & Writing Contest || 15 Steem in prize pool || My most beautiful image

My most beautiful image

Hello community, from Venezuela ...
I share with you one of my most beautiful images that is part of my book "Living Jewels"

© 2020, Orlando Monteleone. All rights reserved

What did "Living Jewels" mean to me in my growth towards the spiritual? I think that returning to the cemetery of the Cementerio General del Sur - cemetery in the west of Caracas -, to observe and record the sculptural heritage that remains there, is it a return to that "living death" or is it an exercise in longing? The making of this book is a ritual act in three directions. The first is associated with the amazing reunion with the imaginary of death that Caracas society had in the 19th and early 20th centuries: the meaning of the images of the tombs, their pathetic and pious expressions, the religious tradition that gives them meaning, the implicit social mark in their dimensions and materials, the dignity of the dead and the family tradition, what was silenced and everything that began to be said. The second refers us to the history of art in Venezuela: its authors and styles, the neoclassical delusions of Guzmán Blanco, the search for identity and structure through the beautiful and correct forms, and the character cosmopolitan of a city under reconstruction. Finally, the third is in photography: the eye and the thought that record not a story but a map of sensitivity, detail and understanding of space. Photography brings together the possibility of looking from the present and connecting with those conditions that in the past gave meaning to the sculptures. It is a relationship that seduces us. It is a look at the present, which never tries to deceive us, capable of revealing the presence of a culture unknown today and the signs of time that has passed. There is no nostalgia; we are facing a gaze seduced by art and time.
My photographs in Joyas Vivas refer us more to a ritual of life than to a memory of death. The images in my book try to fulfill the task of bringing together, in an aesthetic space, the present and the absent. They will continue to do so regardless of the abandonment to which they may be subjected. These tombs have been the resting place for the deceased and, at the same time, they have elegantly welcomed visitors. They are the space of the deceased and, also, of the family and of the entire culture that brings them together in life and in death. My greatest wish with the "Living Jewels" project is that people manage to appreciate it as a beautiful aesthetic project, once again in the idea that living should include "a good death".

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