Just Another Manic Mediterranean Sunrise

You’ll see some beautiful images below, but I had to run an unpleasant 5:30a.m. gauntlet to get there.

Out of the Metro at Ciutadella/Villa Olímpica…past the Catwalk and Opium clubs…among drunk and half drunk shadows just now emerging from the depths into the first morning light…through invisible, heavy, hovering clouds laden with the thick scents of urine, marijuana, beer, and the latest Passeig de Gracia perfumes…amongst the vast, sparkling, collections of empty beer cans, abandoned liquor bottles, cracked plastic cups…through the echoing shouts of “y tu puta madre también…eres un hijo de puta, cabrón“, and so on.

Who? Mostly foreigners who will do in this country or region what they likely wouldn’t do at home.

Out on the pier, on these photo safaris, I will occasionally pick up a stray plastic bag, fill it with a few beer cans, and return it to the nearest recycling or trash container. I feel like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, though. Does it really matter? (After all, there is a virtual army–courtesy of the City of Barcelona and its taxpayers–waiting with machines, buckets and brooms to scour the beaches at dawn. They don’t seem to clean the rocks on the piers very often, however.)

If we all had a different, more intimate, relationship with this Earth, it occurs to me that even drunk young people would never consider trashing it as they do. It would be considered too vulgar. (Yes, I know we adults are trashing the Earth on a much greater scale than a few beer cans on a beach in Spain, but we have to start somewhere, no?)

So, I make my photographs…