Written By William Warren
Photos by Dean Barrett
Page 2

I think this is how many of us construct our overall
impression of a strange place — perhaps of some not so
very strange places as well. We may strengthen it with
the bricks and mortar of hard facts — with history and
current statistics, learned data on culture, customs, and
geographical features — but basically it is founded on
those airy, elusive, highly subjective mental images
gathered irresponsibly and at random along city streets
and country roads, glimpsed accidentally through
gateways and windows, from buses and taxis and trains
rumbling through an alien night.

I would not for a minute pretend that impressions so
formed are complete or accurate. Some eyes have a
tendency to seek out beauty, even in the most unlikely
places, while others are instinctively attracted by oddi-
ty, sometimes by squalor. Moreover, some places seem
to abound in vivid, sharply-defined images that produce
an immediate response, while others tend to be uncer-
tain, contradictory, hard to pin down. Finally, one is
constantly adding images to the impression the more
one gets to know a place, clarifying here, revising there,
sometimes discovering something that drastically alters
the whole structure.

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