Four frames, four different moods, all of them shot in the middle of a crowd or just outside one.
The first is Piazza Duomo in Taormina, Sicily, at the hour when nobody sensible is outside. Midday, no shade anywhere, and the square is still packed. The baroque fountain sits in the centre with its odd little centaur on top, and behind it the Farmacia Ragusa signage runs across the yellow facade in two languages, Italian and German, which tells you most of what you need to know about who has been visiting this town for the last hundred years. Balconies stacked with geraniums. A tour guide holding up a numbered paddle. Two women in the foreground with ice cream, walking away from the fountain, completely uninterested in it. That's the picture, really. The monument is the backdrop and the people are the subject.
The second is Florence, shot from inside the Loggia dei Lanzi looking out. Giambologna's spiral of twisting bodies dominates the left of the frame, lit hard against a blue sky with one good cloud in it. Out in Piazza della Signoria there's a huge grey lump of a modern sculpture, all folds and thumbprints, standing where the tourists gather. Two sculptures, four centuries apart, sharing a square. Whether you think the second one earns its place there is a whole argument in itself, but as a photograph the contrast does the work for you.
Third is the quiet one. A woman in a red dress and a red fascinator, walking fast along a limestone wall in a small French town, clutch bag under one arm and something wrapped in tissue in her hand. She's dressed for a wedding and she's late, or she wants you to think she isn't late. The wall behind her is the real co-star. Cut stone, hard sun, and that row of narrow slit openings throwing a line of shadows across the whole frame like teeth. Everything is beige and grey and then there's this one moving red shape cutting through it.
The last is Porto at blue hour, Praça da Ribeira. The houses lean into each other, tall and thin and painted every colour anyone had lying around, one of them faced in blue azulejos, another one with laundry strung across the front. Nobody has fixed the render on any of them and the square is better for it. Restaurant umbrellas and empty chairs at the bottom of the frame, a Ribeira Square sign glowing over a doorway, and the big dark cube sculpture off to the right. The sky has gone that flat pale blue you only get for about fifteen minutes.
Different countries, same instinct. Point the camera at the square and wait for someone to walk into it.
