Photographic Walks in Granada
Alle Texte in diesem Buch, das käuflich nicht erwerbbar ist, sind in englischer und in spanischer Sprache gehalten. Das Buch soll besonderen Besucher:innen der Fakultät für Erziehungswissenschaften der Universität Granada überreicht werden.
Zu finden sind in diesen „Paseos fotográficos por Granada“ gut 120 Fotografien von Jürgen van Buer, die er während seinen inzwischen 29 Besuchen der Universität zwischen 2010 und 2019 auf seinen Stadtspaziergängen gemacht hat. Unterbrochen wurden seine Besuche durch die Covid-Pandemie; er nimmt sie aber 2022 wieder auf. Denn seine Liebeserklärungen an Granada, an den Albaícin, an die Alhambra haben nichts von ihrer Kraft eingebüßt, sind nach wie vor ungebrochen.
Gegliedert ist das Buch in vier Spaziergänge, die auf ganz eigene Weise durch die Stadt und durch die Alhambra führen – jeder dieser Spaziergänge eingeläutet durch einen kleinen narrativen Text, in dem der Fotograf seine Gefühle und Gedanken zum Ausdruck bringt. Im Folgenden ist eine kleine Auswahl der Fotografien zu finden.
Jürgen van Buer
Introduction
Not all visitors who come to Granada do it to visit its monuments or wonders, some come to visit the university. This is the context in which we met professor Dr. Jürgen van Buer to the Faculty of Education some years ago. The objective was to renew a teacher and student mobility programme between the Faculty of Education of Humboldt Uni- versity and our faculty.
At that time, professor van Buer was the dean of the Faculty of Education and his institutional visit responded to an invitation put forward a year earlier. What no one could imagine was that, that first visit was transformed into a continuous collaboration only interrupted in the year 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A result of that long time collaboration with professor van Buer and his team are the many workshops, seminars and group works on professional dual training, area in which he and his team are renowned international experts.
Nevertheless, the reason of this picture book, which very probably has already caught the attention of the reader, is a different one. Which without any doubt will help to foster and built international relations beyond academic and research exchange programmes, and do so much for the common welfare. The intention was to prepare a book which would be used as a presentation letter to the Faculty of Education, to the University of Granada, and our city. There are many travel books which have captured since the XVIII century the impressions of the visitors to Granada. The aim was to add a different and contemporaneous vision to that cohort of writers and travelers who so well and so many times have taken the time and effort to describe the wonders of our city.
During his visits to our institution, we came to know one of his passions, photography. In each of them his pictures from different travels served as presents. In fact, in the year 2011 we ainvited him to make a picture exhibition in our faculty showing selection of pictures taken in Syria during his academic collaboration with the Syrian government. Needless to say, that many of the pictures we could see in that exhibition, showed places and monuments wiped away by the civil war. Because of his good knowledge of the city and the University, we suggested him to produce a picture book that could be used as a guidebook or handbook for all the visitors to the Faculty of Education and at the same time to help know the university and the city better.
This work reflects his personal vision, built up along the many years he has visited us, what has allowed him to be a faithful witness of our reality in the last years. cannot finish these introductory words without appreciating and thanking him publicly for his selfless work and sincere collaboration.
Javier Villoria Prieto
Dean Faculty of Education
The Beauty of Granada Photographic Promenades or 1001 Reasons to Come Back to the Faculty of Sciences of Education
Undoubtedly, there are hundreds of reasons to write about the beauty of Granada, of the Alhambra and the Generalife. And sometimes it seems that all these reasons have just been written down. In this book, you find some of my reasons why I come back to the Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación and to Granada since 2010, several times year per year: The first reason to come back is the Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación itself. It convinced me from my first visit on by its very open-minded discussions about education and education- al systems, about the view on the different national traditions around the world, and above all, here in Europe. There was that warm intellectual embracement during the extensive intellectual exchanges, there were…
The second reason is Carmen de la Victoria, one of the guest- houses of the university. For me, it is a luminous jewel with its gardens and with the view from the terrace on the Alhambra, better with the changing views on this cultural miracle along the varying illuminations of the day. And with the mystic lights late in the evening when the air embeds all the personal inner pictures of the university, of the city and of the Alhambra into an individual manuscript the visitor, maybe, begins to write sitting at the terrace of the Carmen de la Victoria. For me, Carmen de la Victoria is the perfect place to re-elaborate what I have learned along all the fruitful discussions with the colleagues at the Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación.
And there hundreds of third reasons. You find their visual surfaces included in this book. Photographies about the beauties of this city and of the Alhambra and its miracles. When you merge them as a unity of different accesses and impressions, than a stupefying surplus will grow up, the surplus which guides you up to, perhaps, 1001 reasons. And why are the surfaces of all these reasons presented here in black and white? Is there no inherent colour? Of course, there is when you want to follow the ready-made pictures nearly pre- fabricated to be engulfed within some seconds or minutes. Black and white offers a different access to you: These photographies bring up to shine the inherent structures of the phenomena.
This book invites can to follow four promenades -three across the city and one along the miracles of the Alhambra and the Generalife – and to invite you to come back.
Jürgen van Buer