Xwejni Bay, Malta

When you live in a place that is as small as Malta, it is difficult to escape the homogeneity of its landscapes. Everything looks roughly the same and sometimes you get the feeling that everywhere you turn all you see are the same things.

Yet that isn’t always the case. At Xwejni, Gozo, the limestone at the shore has slowly eroded away over time leaving a piece of rock jutting on top of an anorexic looking pilaster. It is an alien looking piece of landscape; the kind which in the fifties or sixties would have been used as a backdrop for a B-movie that featured trips to Mars.

If you want to visit Xwejni Bay, here you can find the directions.

An Ordinary Thing

By Mike Innes

Throughout 2013 I produced several issues of Ordinary Things, a tiny homemade zine of my own photography of everyday subjects. These I mailed out to various interested people, including Paul of snapshotsofmalta.com. When it came to the end of the year, to round the project off I invited submissions for a contributors' special. From the images that people sent in, I selected the ones I liked best and which fitted most closely with the idea of Ordinary Things. Then I set about compiling the zine: printing out and guillotining the pages, making the cover, writing some accompanying text and trying to reach a decision about the order in which the pictures would appear.

One thing I was clear about from the start was that the image of the door submitted by Paul would be first in the zine proper. There were three main reasons for this. First, it engaged the viewer in a narrative which said, "What's on the other side of the door? If you want to know, you'll have to open it and look," thereby providing a natural way in to the other pictures. Second, there was in the photograph something colloquial - ordinary, even - which made it match the zine's ethos. Third, it was at the same time beautiful, mysterious, potentially either forbidding or inviting depending on your perspective or frame of mind, textured and characterful... all of which I was pleased to present as aspects of the everyday. In other words Paul's picture provided the ideal start to the final issue of Ordinary Things.

Ordinary Things may have come to an end but Mike still posts a selection of photos on Tumblr and on Twitter.

Abandoned but not Unnoticed

Whenever I happen across an abandoned building, I unfailingly find myself wondering what it was like when it was full of life.  Had kids filled its rooms with their laughter?  Or had it been the home of some big business; a place that delivered the daily bread to countless workers?

When you start noticing such buildings, it is incredible what you come across.  Huge houses with facades covered in marble that have lost their shine under layers of dust, no longer a symbol of the richness of the people who built it but a sign of their faltering bloodline.  So too huge warehouses, where the rusting intricate designs on the wrought iron is a reminder that someone once believed that the river of money would never stop flowing through this place.

Most of the time, it is fairly easy to determine what kind of building this was.  Sometimes, however, it isn’t so easy and this is one of those cases.

On my way to work, at the heart of Marsa, I go past this strange building.  It seems to be built into rock and, being in a road where there are a number of warehouses, one would suppose that this was a store of some kind.  Yet much greater care has been given to the look of this place than anywhere else in the same road, with a decorated door frame that indicates that this place had loftier ambitions than those of its neighbours.

That past grandeur is slowly fading away.  Rust is eating away at the iron door and whilst the limestone is flaking; slowly erasing the work done to decorate it.  Even so, enough remains to ignite my curiosity.  Was it, then, a humble store or was it something more than that?

Sometimes, the stories that I read during my childhood start to tickle my imagination.  Perhaps this is a path to some fantastical place; a door which has been given a weathered look by some form of magic hiding it thus in plain sight.  All it needs is for the chosen ones to come looking and the magical veil will be lifted.

Who knows what lies behind that rusting door?  Most probably, I never will.  And, in a strange way, it is better that way because it allows my imagination to break free and wander a bit when I pass by each morning.

If you're intrigued and want to have a look for yourself, this building is found opposite the Marsa Parish Church, on Triq is-Salib.