Maybe I'm just unlucky, but every time I go there it rains. It's probably a little more obvious with each article I do, but I'm gradually realizing that I have this interest in desolation in my photos; as much as I enjoy shooting vast landscapes, nothing satisfies me more than a ruined building rising out of the ground with the grace of a wreck out of the water. I think it comes from a combination of factors, but probably most of all already from the fact that I'm fascinated by the past, by how people lived twenty, fifty, a hundred years before me and what their daily lives and the world really looked like beyond the sepia filters and the big dates. This explains my approach to photographing wastelands and timeless places - I always feel that I'm not just capturing a particular place, but taking with me the thousand thousand silent stories that, in shape and color, reveal themselves in the final image. This also explains my use (no doubt excessive, I realize) of blue and green bends, which give the whole thing a cachet that removes the image from the present context and places it unconsciously in the past. Without it really being a definite era, I simply feel that my images have the allure of images from decades long before us, and secretly I like that. It's a pleasure to see people up there whom I used to see every week when I was a kid, and whom I've now gradually lost sight of despite myself. Some of them are unrecognizable, others have remained true to themselves - the place, for its part, is visually anchored in its time, and probably will remain so for a long time to come. Saturday's concert was fun, varied according to the target audience, and even if my sleepless night the night before prevented me from really appreciating anything at two in the morning, I had a good time. The second day was much more aimed at the older generation (or even the one before that), with accordions and long dinners in tents in the rain... in the end, the most memorable moment was when I escaped with a buddy to take a wide shot of the hamlet by climbing a steep hill. On the way back I stopped several times to take photos, even in the rain. These are long, narrow, winding reds, where I often drive alone - not a car for miles around, for an hour's drive. No one's around to care if I stop in the middle to take in the misty mountain opposite, and that's priceless. I think I've spent so much time in the towns and villages of the immediate coast that going deep into the mountains is just what I needed to dust off my camera. It's been five months since I last photographed, so it was nice to get back into it, and deep down I know I miss it.