Cruz y Ortiz - Santa Justa Train Station, Seville, Spain, 1991.

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In preparation for the Universal Exposition of Seville (Expo'92), Spain, the town decided to create some infrastructures to wellcome the millions of visitors that would wish to enjoy the event.

A new airport, designed by Rafael Moneo, and a new railway station, designed by the sevillian architects Cruz y Ortiz, were built.

I had the opportunity to photograph both sites on assignment for the portuguese architectural magazine "Architecti".

On a former post about Expo'92, I showed you the Pabellon de la Navegación by the architect Guillermo Vásquez Consuegra, also a sevillian.

Today, I will show you some photographs of Estación Santa Justa, by Antonio Cruz Villalón and Antonio Ortiz García.
Besides their office in Seville, they also run an office in Amsterdam.

This enormous facility was not yet completely finished, as you can understand in some images.
If I remember correctly, only about half of the tracks were already on duty.

My work turned out to be very unpleasant, as the station guards decided to bother me and I was plagued by constant interruptions. Sometimes I had just prepared my Sinar camera for a shot and they came to tell me that I couldn't photograph from "here", I could only photograph from "there", and pointed a little abstract point somewhere a little further...
Half an hour later they would come again and say that "you can't photograph from this track, you can only photograph from that track!".

Naturally, I would not only miss the shot, as each time I would have to carry all the stuff around...

And so the game kept going on for a while, until I got so bored that I left everything behind and rushed to the administration complaining. Needless to say that I already had a written permission since the first minute I started working.

Very often, the "small" people in the authority chain like to think that they are very important and try to play the big boss.

It can be rather annoying to play such power games, when you are struggling with thirty or fourty kilograms of photographic equipment...

In fact, the same situation was encountered in Consuegra's Pabellon, and in Expo'98 in Lisbon, to name a few.

As mentioned before, the transparencies were shot with a Sinar f2 camera. Lenses by Schneider Kreuznach. Sheetfilm in 4x5 inches (or 9x12) by Kodak - the photograph depicting the yellow train, was shot with the same camera, but using a Linhof Rapid Rollex 6x7 rollfilm back.
Very heavy tripod from Linhof.
Sekonic and Minolta lightmeters, etc., etc.

Lots of (beer) durst (german word for thirst) by the end of the day...

(Excuse me for my poor scans. I did them some time ago, when my skills were still lesser than they are now).

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