Azalea Valley, Gothenburg -- Anniversary Edition

My visits to the so-called "Azalea Valley" in the month of May are numerous. The valley is actually a rather small area in Gothenburg's largest city-park, a kind of hollow slope, providing some shelter from three sides which the Azalea bushes seem to like. What draws many visitors here in the spring are the many different colors, some intense, others subtle and refined. And the scent is an experience in itself: it is never pungent, it never hits you head-on. It rather hovers over the valley with its hint of incense, uplifting, but also teasing. Often it feels like that you don't ever want to leave the place, you just can't get enough of it. And it makes me wish for a camera that could record fragrances alongside the pictures.

This 2018 Azalea blooming season came to a sudden end, due to an unprecedented heat spell in Northern Europe. And right at that time it was twenty years ago that a group of students and I myself carried out a photo-project in the park. Our images, posters and image-shows were well received locally and also travelled all the way to the UN-headquarters in New York, as a part of an exhibition of student work connected to the 50:th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. (Go here for a project description).
Regarding this slideshow: Pictures showing student-models started out as 35 mm Kodachrome slides. These two decades old pictures I wanted to intermix with more recent digital pictures taken in the 16x9 ratio format. Digitizing slides results in a 3x2 ratio. Full-screen HD viewing without any black bars on the sides thus requires giving up some vertical 'territory' in order to fill the entire width of  the 16x9 format. Not always easy, some slides just won't tolerate this treatment. Sometimes it helps to peel out a Kodachrome from its framing, where a tiny bit of image content was hidden by the frame. That can save you from an unacceptable cropping.