The Artful Engineer

After having so much fun photographing doors and windows and such in Santorini, Greece, the previous April, last fall I spent some time on two consecutive Sundays out wandering around in a colorful old neighborhood south of downtown Tucson called Barrio Viejo. I had driven through the area a number of times, but the only time I clearly recall taking photos there was when I took some portraits of my two youngest daughters back in 2013.

These first two pictures are reminiscent of the less touristy areas of Santorini in their rundownedness: badly in need of fresh paint and probably abandoned. I like the first picture because everything is screened or barred over, except the top center window that is wide open, barless and glassless. In the second picture, all the electric meters are old and rusty except the two with new meters, which makes a nice contrast. Also, the capped gas pipe sticking out of the ground in the lower left, although a small detail that almost blends into the wall behind it, provides some visual balance to the electric meters and the door.

The next two photos are from better-maintained parts of the neighborhood: neat, tidy, and colorfully-painted:

Brightly-colored buildings are the norm in Barrio Viejo, but there are exceptions:

These very symmetric and well-maintained entrances are a stark contrast to the somewhat dilapidated buildings we began with, but here is my favorite, partway along its journey from proud and colorful to faded and rundown:

I wonder if someone will redeem this structure before it descends into complete decay.

Technical notes. The photographs in this post were taken with a Nikon Z7. Five of these images were taken with the Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S and the other—featuring the saguaros in front of the white building—was taken with the Nikkor Z 85mm f/1,8 S. All were processed from RAW in Adobe Lightroom Classic.