Book PATAGONIA "the lingering eye"

About the book “ PATAGONIA ” the lingering eye

Through these book, the lingering eye has echoed with the Patagonian landscape. This mystic region, which cradles all types of adventures, stories, traditions and cultures within its vast territory, acts as a magnet first attracting and then trapping the attentive observer who admires these natural sceneries; and we are bound to see and look at them with a lingering eye, there being nothing or nobody to harass or disturb us.

We are in need of time, of taking a deep and long breath to become harmonized, through it, with nature itself.

With the lingering eye we want to take in everything and dominate space.
However, nature will dominate and impose its rhythm on us, so that the lingering eye can gaze at each and every detail, at each and every region, glacier, lake, mountain, valley or river. Even the precarious construction of a farm will become harmonized, as if by magic, with the landscape itself, which will lead us towards a nostalgia that has extremely sensitized us through … the lingering eye.

Alberto Gandsas
www.gandsas.com
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Patagonia, the lingering eye is the sequel of my first book “A voyage to Southern Argentina through panoramic photography”.

As we enter Patagonia we start admiring natural, immense, unending sceneries, we acquire a lingering contemplative attitude, of respect towards Creation. Not everyone does react with the same sensitivity, but I daresay that most people do because I have seen and experienced it.

As a complement to the panoramic photos, in this book I shall integrate some others, bearing a different format, which were taken during my first trips to Patagonia.

Analogical and digital, all the photos share the same context: they reflect serenity. They are as serene as I experienced them at the time of taking each and every photo, even with the aggressiveness, barrenness, and desolation of the landscape or place that would stretch before my eyes.

We shall not see a huge piece of ice falling loudly from a glacier. We shall see a long, mellowing glacier inviting us to observation and meditation.

We shall travel from one place to another at the “turn-the-page” speed, towards an area or region that can be nearer or further away.

As we feel stunned on seeing a certain lake, we will be before the wide scenery of the Patagonian plateau, the quiet corner of a farm, a mountain chain or the colors of the fall. We shall observe part of its flora and part of its fauna, and we will feel powerless before the presence of the landscape itself, languid and silent at times.

The territory of the Patagonia has been considered as a desolate region throughout time by historians, seamen that navigated its coasts or by the travelers that visited it.

The vastness of Patagonia makes it impossible to reflect it photographically in only one book. There exists no one and only photograph that can show by itself what Patagonia is like. There will always be missing a corner, a mountain, a river, a valley, a narrow path, a glacier, a road, a farm or an image to photographically complete what you wish to show.

In “Patagonia, the lingering eye”, color will provide the necessary realism to let us see nature as it is, full of nuances.

Alberto Gandsas