The Train of Photography | SCOPIO MAGAZINE ARCHITECTURE, ART AND IMAGE

FEATURED TEXTS, RESEARCH PAPERS OR PROJECTS | Editors Ana Miriam Rebelo, Maria Neto

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2024): scopio Magazine AAI-Exploring Contemporary Realities

• José Maças de Carvalho

Abstract

Oblivion is the illness of reminiscence. As Paul Ricoeur factors out, remembering is a type of labour and an obligation of reminiscence.

Photography, in its essence, is an support memoire. Whenever we gaze upon photographs, we’re overwhelmed by a whirlwind of seemingly forgotten sensations. Photography serves this means of remembrance and anamnesis successfully, permitting us to replace our imaginative and prescient of the previous and stopping photographs from crystallising it. While this memorial side of Photography is important for understanding its evocative and even transformative energy, it’s equally vital to acknowledge the evolution of Photography from the Nineteen Seventies to the current day. It is value noting that throughout the context of the early Modernist Avant-Garde actions, Photography considerably diverged from its social origins and have become essential in lots of visible experiments in the course of the Constructivist interval and early Surrealism.

Photography liberated itself from its social operate from the Nineteen Seventies onwards, coexisting with the emergence of the second Avant-Garde motion of the twentieth century. At this level, it started to be instrumentalised for practices requiring an enduring medium, resembling Performance and Happenings, or, in a extra vernacular sense, to precise points topic to sociological or anthropological reception.

What is definite is that its significance and freshness emerged throughout the creative subject, notably within the realms of the theatricality and fiction. We subsequently think about that the start line for Contemporary Photography lies on this interval, with most of the authors who started their careers at the moment nonetheless actively producing work at the moment.

The college students’ sensible work, which constitutes 75% of their remaining evaluation, is developed over the semester throughout the framework of two tasks. The first focuses on self-portrait, whereas the second revolves across the thought of appropriation or, alternatively, the event of a visible narrative.

Despite its autobiographical definition and affiliation with Art History, self-portrait is known broadly and diversely. It is at all times a poetic perspective (that which lies past the actual), the “self” as “other”, reworking Photography right into a subject of narrative expression. In the second undertaking, the methodology of appropriation is predicated on the concept appropriationist strategies outline the paradigm of latest creation, aligned with buying data as the start line for all studying. The various second undertaking matches inside a broad subject, which could be referred to as home or non-public narratives, favouring a sequential organisation (nonetheless paratactic it could be) and the coexistence of photographs with a relational dynamic that enhances their connection greater than the person worth of every picture.

Eva Postica’s self-portrait work embodies a refined poetic directness but in addition displays the strangeness of locations, adopting a important stance in self-representation. Margaux Mazure’s pictures, additionally within the subject of self-representation, possess an environment akin to photo-performance, influenced by fashionable experiments from Man Ray to André Kertész. Ricardo Almeida’s self-portraits ought to be considered as important gestures of self-representation in suburban public areas. However, they reveal a really intense chromatic and constructive density that favours the fusion of determine and background.

Salomé Monteiro’s appropriation undertaking begins with Jeff Wall’s {photograph} Insomnia, making a radical shift from the unique setting to a public backyard. By stripping the work of its depressive character, she updates the on a regular basis gestures and postures of idle life within the backyard and daytime sleep.

Finally, Sofia Pratas Morais’ work holds narrative potential, wandering by city areas that shut off to the photographic lens by compositional decisions that trace at hesitant exits and reveal a well-recognized strangeness.

Departamento de Arquitetura e Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade de Coimbra