Art Opening
San Miguel de Allende: A Visual Diary
Todd Williams
Thu, Apr 2, time
Galeria Bordello
Órganos 19 

Photographer illuminates lives and streets By Atención staff

Austin-based photographer and teacher Todd Williams first discovered San Miguel de Allende in 2002 and became immersed in its color, texture and warm orange light. “It was like I had stumbled off a Mexican bus into an Italian hill town,” he said. Williams found the creative energy magnetic, returned in 2003, took a casita for several months and began a long-term photographic project, which is in its final stages.

A bus stop in front of a yellow wall at sunset and old Mexican men in cowboy hats drinking tequila at a roadside bar provide two iconic images for William’s one-man show of photographs. “I was really happy that Barbara (Poole, owner of Galería Bordello) responded to the work in the way that she did. She understood how much effort I had put into the project.”

His book, San Miguel de Allende: A Visual Diary, appears in mid-2009. “The book is less a documentary work than a lyrical interpretive look at the place and its people. The quality of texture and color in the city really is a canvas for the people who interact with it under the most amazing light.”

“I move slowly, working all night sometimes,” he says, “with my Hasselblad film camera on a tripod, walking the streets in search of these magnificent walls which seem like Mark Rothko paintings, with a profound spiritual presence expressed in the decaying texture, which always finds renewal somehow.”

He also shoots documentary street scenes with a digital SLR camera, which is a change for him. “Almost all the San Miguel project is film-based, but now I feel more comfortable with digital capture and know I can create images with the strong saturated colors I see so often.”

The gallery prints are created on pigment printers with archival inks that should stand the test of time, Williams says. “The materials are excellent now and I’m confident in their stability and fidelity. It’s a shame to put them behind glass, because the textural and tactile quality of the paper is so powerful.”