AA-2026-A543BE
On the image
Sometime in the 1950s, a traveler pointed a camera straight up into a narrow passage between a plastered wall and a substantial Romanesque brick church, producing the kind of shot that travel photography manuals had not yet thought to endorse. The church wall dominating the right side — thick medieval brick, arched blind windows, a terracotta-tiled roof — belongs to a building that had already been standing for the better part of a millennium when the shutter clicked. The photographer was working with the conviction, common in that era, that any angle was worth trying once.
The architectural evidence points to the Spanish meseta or possibly southern France — Toledo, Salamanca, or Toulouse are plausible candidates — where Romanesque parish churches were packed tightly into medieval street grids that had never once been widened to accommodate a thought about tourism. The jutting iron balcony on the plaster wall to the left and the faded wooden overhang beside it are the additions of maybe four centuries of residents improvising shelter over a lane that was never meant to be a thoroughfare.
The tourist who took this came home with forty slides and gave a carousel presentation to people who were too polite to leave. This one, though — the accidental compression of nine hundred years of building into a single upward glance — is the frame that actually holds.
Visually related — by likeness
Medieval Brick Church and Narrow Alley, Southern Europe, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-A543BE. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/medieval-brick-church-and-narrow-alley-southern-europe-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026A543BE,
title = {Medieval Brick Church and Narrow Alley, Southern Europe, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-A543BE},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/medieval-brick-church-and-narrow-alley-southern-europe-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Medieval Brick Church and Narrow Alley, Southern Europe, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-A543BE UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/medieval-brick-church-and-narrow-alley-southern-europe-1950s ER -
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