El Palmar – Hidden life between sea and fields

By Andrea Ferro

Walks along the road, the usual roads, looks but you don’t see. Everything begins with the need to discover
something new. This is the really most fascinating paradox. New it’s not a place never explored before, new
in this case it’s something forgotten, marginal, that passes unnoticed and that is often just behind the corner.
We walked in front of it absent-mindedly maybe for years, maybe it’s a place that we knew and that we have
forgotten, we know that is there, that exists, but we don’t care a lot about his destiny.
We have read once something about it in the newspaper or we simply heard speaking of it. All these places
still hide endless possibilities directly connected whith the level of the «aperture» of our eyes.

At the beginning you move underplaying, walking along streets, lanes and plazas, passing through the
people with the camera in your hand, but you still don’t know how to act.
You try to come in contact with the spirit of the place, waiting for something that doesn’t come from outside,
that confidence that allows you to understand the light, to see beyond appearances and realize what
happens below the surface, the spark that allows you to understand which are the most interesting or
representative points, and how to picture them in the best way.

What is the feeling people have with his own roads? Which is the connection between what’s built and what’s
not? How natural and artificial, full and empty converse among them?
How does the quality of the light affects the definition of the volumes and their perception?

I wish testify through-the-lens in this personal path which are the atmospheres, lights and shades, the spatial
quality and the character of what often surround us, but at the same time its fragility, its problems and
contradictions.

These aspects pass unnoticed to the greatest part of us. Therefore, the goal of my job has been to testify
through my photos this parallel reality that’s still possible to find out in that spaces often considered as
marginal.

The scenery of this research has been the small «pueblo» of the El Palmar, situated inside the park of the
Albufera’s lagoon in Valencia (Spain). This is a small site of fishermen and farmers originary, surrounded by
risefields and water’s lake, actually still looking for an equilibrium among history, tradition and contemporary
life.

» To find something new, something that nobody might have imagined before,
something that only you can find because, besides being a photographer,
you are a quite special human being, capable of deep looking where others would go straigh on. »

Margaret Bourke-White