Burning of the Devil Portraits

El hombre propone, Dios dispone y El Diablo lo descompone.

What better way to caption these portraits of strangers at the Burning of the Devil festivity in La Antigua Guatemalan than with this famous saying that roughly translates as “Man proposes, God disposes, and the Devil counterposes.”

Let me explain. See a Russian couple and I were capturing vistas of daily life in Antigua Guatemala as part of a photo walk and had decided we were going to finish with images of the Quema del Diablo. Well, everything was going as planned, except by the time we got close to where the devil was supposed to burn, we could not reach a good spot to photograph in time. There were simply too many people and it took us 45 minutes to walk the one block that separated us from the burning effigy of devil.

So, we changed plans and instead focus our cameras on the people around us and made some interesting street portraits of strangers, some of them wearing horns as you can see here. Needless to say, I really liked the new focus and next year I might only aim at doing portraits of the people there, perhaps some with the burning devil in the background.

By the way, by the time we reached the remains of the burnt effigy, the firemen were ready to put out the fire with water. This is what it looked like when they opened the flow of water.

© 2015 – 2020, Rudy Giron. All rights reserved.