Izamal is a town of 30,000 people ninety minutes east of Mérida by road, and it is the most visually coherent town I photograph in Mexico. Every building in the historic centre is painted the same ochre yellow by municipal ordinance, a colour that was chosen in 1993 when Pope John Paul II visited and the town was painted to welcome him. Before that it was a mix of colours like any Mexican town. Now it is a single uninterrupted yellow that makes the photographs specific to nowhere else. The Convento de San Antonio de Padua, built on top of a pre-Hispanic pyramid in 1561, anchors the town from the central atrium and gives a scale of colonial religious architecture that the Yucatan Peninsula is full of but that Izamal presents with the specific advantage of the yellow facade against the blue sky that makes the images immediately different.

The Atrium and the Convent

The Convento de San Antonio de Padua has the second-largest atrium in the world after the Vatican, which gives the ceremony space a scale that is difficult to communicate from photographs. The ochre walls of the atrium, the colonial arches, and the pyramid stones visible in the construction of the walls where the Spanish used the original Maya stonework as building material: all of this is in the background when a couple stands in the centre of the atrium at morning light. The eastern arcade catches direct light from about 7:30am for two hours before the sun is overhead and the atrium fills with flat midday light. The ceremony in the eastern arcade in the morning is my primary Izamal ceremony setup: one of the most architecturally extraordinary ceremony spaces I photograph anywhere.

The town outside the convent rewards walking. The Calle 31 that runs north from the main plaza has the specific Izamal streetscape at its best: the yellow facades on both sides of the road with the occasional blue or terracotta door interrupting the palette, and the slow traffic of horse-drawn carriages (still the primary local transport in the historic centre) moving through the frame. The carriage traffic is not staged for tourism; it is how people get around in Izamal, which makes the photographs of it more interesting than any arranged-for-a-photo version would be.

Street in Izamal Yucatan Mexico with the characteristic ochre yellow colonial buildings and arched architecture of this single-colour painted town — The Izamal streetscape: a single uninterrupted yellow by municipal ordinance since 1993. No other town in Mexico has this visual coherence. The photograph is immediately specific to here.

Light in the Yellow Town

The all-yellow surface of Izamal behaves differently in the light than any other colonial town I photograph. In morning light the yellow is warm and dimensional, with the shadow sides of facades reading darker and the lit sides glowing. In midday overhead light the yellow becomes flat and slightly harsh. At golden hour before sunset the entire town turns amber in a way that photographs as extraordinary saturation because the yellow is already saturated and the warm light intensifies it further. The specific golden hour window in Izamal, when the sun is at twenty degrees and catching the convent atrium from the west, is one of the most saturated natural-light portrait conditions I photograph in North America.

The arched vaulted architecture Las Bovedas in Izamal Yucatan Mexico with the characteristic yellow stone construction of the colonial buildings — The arched vaulted architecture of Izamal: built on top of Mayan pyramids using original stonework, painted yellow for the last thirty years. The scale and the colour together are unlike any other colonial town in the Yucatan.

Combining Izamal With Mérida

Izamal and Mérida are ninety minutes apart and genuinely different from each other: Mérida is a functioning city of one million, Izamal is a colonial town where horse carts are the standard transport. The couple who wants the Yucatan hacienda context for their ceremony can hold the ceremony at a hacienda near Mérida and drive to Izamal for the portrait session, which gives the gallery two visual registers that neither location alone produces. The hacienda gives the private ceremony in a restored colonial estate. Izamal gives the town photography in the yellow streets. Both are within the Yucatan and the drive between them is through flat henequen-agave countryside that is itself photographable.