Spinning Perceptions

I found this woman spinning wool on a roof top on Isla Taquile on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca, Peru. I sat with her for a while, but she didn’t seemed particularly pleased to have my company. Eventually I asked if I could take her picture, which she agreed to (I think in large part to see if that would get rid of me) and then took my leave. It was a brutally bright afternoon, with the high altitude sun just blasting everything out. Luckily she was sitting in the shade. Though even in the protection of the wall, the intensity of the light knocked most of the color out of the image. With a little help in Lightroom I was able to bring some of that color back.

Which leads me to something: As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been slowly working my way through “Vision and Voice” by David DuChemin. And as he notes, any post-processing will lead to the question: “Did it really look like that?” And for this image, the answer is no, kinda, and yes. Replicating how things looked when I was there in a photograph is essentially impossible. This is the case for a number of reasons: One, the context for this image is lacking. There is no sign of the village below, the sounds, the voices speaking in Quechua, the heat of the sun, the smells of the island, the calls of the Chiguanco Thrushes, or the huge blue expanse of Lake Titicaca visible hundreds of feet below. All of that comes into play with how I perceived the scene when I was there. That context is absent to the viewer. Even now, years later, my memories are skewed by all those unseen aspects of the scene, so is this how it looked? Maybe. But this is how it felt. The deep blue of the head scarf, the reds of the sweater, the way the old woman stuck her tongue out through a toothless grin, in concentration as the spindle twisted with remarkable speed. Those are the things that caught my attention and what I am trying to emphasize here. The other aspects, the context of the island, those will remain with me.

So no, of course it didn’t look exactly like this. Then again, maybe it did.

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