Penalba de Santiago, Spain 15 x 19” platinum-palladium print with pastel. Prints are numbered and signed by the artist
For four centuries during the Middle Ages, half a million pilgrims a year made the lengthy and difficult journey from their homelands to the northwestern corner of Spain. There, in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, according to local history, lay the remains of St. James, the patron saint of Spain. A pilgrimage to Compostela ranked with those to Jerusalem and Rome as the most sacred of journeys. Joan Myers' photographs of the Spanish pilgrimage and its repercussions on the Hispanic New World have been shown in a traveling exhibition organized by the Albuquerque Museum. They were published in Santiago: Saint of Two Worlds (with text by Joan Myers, Donna Pierce and Marc Simmons), published by University of New Mexico Press, 1991 (now out of print).
