Progressive Street

 ‘The High Plain’ by Stuart Allan Hyde

A long-term, ongoing photographic project started in 2019/20.

In 2017, I started living in Granada’s Altiplano, an area of high, relatively flat land, found in the Northwest of the province, bordered on all sides by mountains. Some 8 million years ago, the area was a massive, deep inlet connecting the Atlantic and Mediterranean Seas until the seismic ‘mountain building’ of the Sierra Nevada to the South raised the area. Sea level fell, forming a huge inland lake that, over thousands of years, gradually drained eastward into the Guadalquivir valley, leaving a flat, fertile high plain that became home to the first major human settlement on the European continent.

Fascinating stuff, none of which had any relevance to my choosing to live here.... I came for beauty. As a painter and photographer, I was swept away by a landscape that was now barren and wild. Areas of dry dune, baked desert badlands, rutted, shallow valleys of coloured sand and the glitter of pearlescent mica, all with the incongruity of dramatic mountain backdrops illuminated by the clearest light I’d ever witnessed.

This project is a personal reaction to that landscape and the inescapability of its ever-changing nature. The process of desertification currently underway is impossible to ignore.

Waterways and deposits are shrinking or disappearing altogether. Agricultural land is reverting to a wild state. Villages are emptying, and places that were once a fertile food store are becoming places of pilgrimage, places of ‘what once was’....

But the beauty isn’t lessened; it’s merely changed.

My photographs are a reaction to the change, the wonder of it, not a document of it.

Photographs are made using a variety of techniques. Analogue and digital cameras. Use of medium format film scans and digital files, either together or separately. Intentional movement of the camera. In-camera composites and multi-exposures. Digital compositing. Physical compositing/rephotographing.