The Primordial Image
Baudelaire regarded photography with considerable scepticism and went so far as to consider it a threat to artistic imagination. In his essay The Modern Public and Photography (1859)[1], he argued that, by mechanically and industrially fixing reality, photography impoverished creativity and led to the degeneration of art. He nevertheless acknowledged its value as an inventory and archive of memory: ‘Let it save from oblivion the ruins that threaten to collapse, the books, engravings and manuscripts devoured by time, the precious things whose form is about to disappear and which deserve a place in the archive of our memory (…) but if it is allowed into the realm of the impalpable and the imaginary, into those things whose only value lies in the soul that man invests in them, then woe betide us!’ Even so, he despised the naturalist tendency towards the exact reproduction of the world that photography contained within it, seeing in it an instrument capable of turning the public into mere consumers of a banal realism, distancing them from true art. For Baudelaire, only painting and poetry, through subjective and transcendental interpretation, could offer an authentic artistic experience.
Time has dispelled much of Baudelaire’s scepticism and, today, the importance of photography as a medium of artistic expression is widely recognized. Certain questions, however, remain pertinent: might not the very role of inventory or archive that Baudelaire attributes to photography be fertile ground, capable of nourishing the artist’s perception, intuition and imagination?
If, for Baudelaire, photography constrained artistic imagination, more than a century later, Susan Sontag regarded photography as a dynamic space for the reinterpretation of reality. The intersections between the photographic image, memory and the construction of narrative processes, whether reflective or artistic in nature, or placed at the service of the media, industry, science or the State, reveal more about the nature of communication than might at first be supposed. The photographic image is always a form of instrumentalization, like any other form of human expression. As Sontag writes: ‘Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles it (…) Things and events are subjected, in the form of photographic images, to new uses, acquiring new meanings that lie beyond the distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the useful and the useless, good taste and bad.’[2]
All photographic production contains an inherent narrative association, similar to that present in the formulation of a thought, an idea or a conversation, filtered through a perceptual or interpretative lens and therefore never entirely neutral. Every discourse is, in a sense, a fiction, a narrative shaped by intentions, choices and subjectivities. Photographic discourse follows the same logic. Like any other language, it constructs meaning through looking, selection and interpretation, whether that of the photographer or that of the public, to return to Baudelaire.
Image and Memory: An Inventory of the Gaze
In the essay The Greed of the Eyes, included in the book Open Sky[3], Paul Virilio investigates, incisively and disquietingly, the relationship between speed and visual perception in contemporary society. With the intensification of visual communication technologies, our capacity to absorb and process information appears to diminish, leading to an increasing sensory saturation. The ‘greed’ of the gaze translates into a fragmented and superficial perception of reality, in which the time required for reflection and deeper thought is sacrificed in favour of immediate visual gratification. As Virilio observes, the ‘optical parade’ is incessant, making it difficult, if not impossible, to believe in the stability of the real: ‘the space of the immobile rapidly gives way to the instability of a public image that has become omnipresent’. He also warns of the dangers of this unrestrained speed, which can lead to the erosion of meaning and the consequent weakening of our critical faculties. If, at the time the essay was written, these reflections were already pertinent, the present landscape of social media, still incipient then, validates and amplifies them.
Beyond the question of ‘freedom of expression’, widely debated in the public sphere, there now emerges a concern with ‘freedom of perception’ and with the threat that visual saturation poses to that freedom. The incessant consumption of images, at an accelerated and constant pace, may lead to a generalized emptying of memory. The art of seeing, once practised, what Virilio describes as the ‘craftsmanship of vision’, gives way to a superficial archive, saturated with ephemeral stimuli that neither take hold nor add value. Without realizing it, the individual becomes impoverished: sees everything, but retains little; accumulates images, but does not explore them in depth; loses critical judgement and becomes vulnerable to the ‘conditioning of the gaze’. Today, this conditioning is amplified by algorithmic mechanisms that select, organize and repeat what we see. The question lies not only in the quantity of images, but in the possibility of maintaining an autonomous, unhurried and critical relationship with them. The individual becomes hostage to a shallow vision, one that he himself feeds, but over which he has no control.
When I reflect on the way my memory is constructed, I realize that it is predominantly visual. I am referring, first of all, to what I am able consciously to observe in the functioning of memory, since its involuntary dimension escapes my control. Most of my memories, if not all of them, whether emotional in nature or purely objective and logical, emerge as fixed images. These frames act as triggers for the reconstruction of memory, gradually revealing the movements, facts, actions or traces stored by the other senses. The starting point is always an image, frozen, without movement, like a photograph kept in an archive box. Only then does it unfold, adding other information to the scene. I do not know whether the phenomenon has a specific biological explanation or whether it results from a visual culture that has been intensely stimulated over the years by my profession, which has led me to collect spaces with my gaze at every moment. What concerns me, however, is the possibility of a ‘pernicious industrialization of vision’, as Virilio describes it. If that is the case, my perception, a product of its time, may already be compromised.
By way of example, I am incapable of memorizing a text, but I know exactly where on the page it appears, as well as the colour and texture of the paper, the typeface, the position of the page number and even the shelf where I may have placed it. Yet I cannot remember the smell of the paper. The same thing happens when a piece of music or a flavour awakens my memory. Images immediately cascade through my mind, almost always of the specific spaces evoked by the memory. Only in a second moment does the emotion associated with it emerge. Hearing and taste are never abstract, they always materialize as images. I try the exercise now: I think of cinnamon and, spontaneously, the image of a cinnamon stick appears, only afterwards come the aroma and the taste. The image is always primordial. Although the stimulus seems automatically to transform itself into an image, memory is constructed, most of the time, involuntarily.
In Proust and Signs[4], Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between voluntary memory, which gives us access to possible truths, and involuntary memory, which brings us closer to something essential (as with Proust’s madeleine). For Deleuze, thought is only truly mobilized when an experience challenges it unexpectedly, almost violently, forcing us to see beyond what we already know. This shock reveals a profound dimension of memory, the one we do not control and which forces us to reconfigure what we understand as truth. It is memory that transcends us. Art, according to Deleuze, operates in this way: its signs do not merely represent reality (as in voluntary memory) or offer us the ‘instantaneous image of eternity’ (as in involuntary memory), but impose themselves upon us. They force us to seek the deepest essence, freeing us from the contingencies of lived states and leading us into more dematerialized and spiritualized, universal domains that transcend the creative self.
When a smell or a piece of music awakens a memory, memory erupts as a series of loose and fragmented images that appear without warning. To reach that essential place where Deleuze situates art, it is necessary to retain the magical secrets whispered by involuntary memory. However, the reproduction of that memory, through architecture, photography or writing, for example, does not transform it into art. Deleuze summarizes: ‘Art will not be seen as a deeper means of exploring involuntary memory. Involuntary memory will be seen as one stage, and not even the most important one, in the apprenticeship of art.’ Art, therefore, takes memory as a form of learning, revealing a new understanding that goes beyond what is familiar and challenges the limits of what we believe to be possible or true.
The photographic narrative O Naipe em Falta (The Missing Suit), developed in dialogue with the novel of the same name, arose from a personal search for clarity in relation to these concerns. I felt the need to recover the craftsmanship of vision of which Virilio speaks, escaping towards less saturated sensory and visual territories. I reflected on the movements of time and on the way my memory is constructed, proceeding from the assumption that my inner universe, whether voluntary or involuntary, is populated by images. The reason why I do so remains uncertain.
I throw myself into art with no guarantee of success, resisting the superficiality of the industrialization of the gaze to which we are exposed every day. I force myself to educate perception and to open a path towards another form of visual consciousness that transcends immediacy and allows me to rediscover the essence of my deepest sensory and cognitive experiences. Hotel La Solitude, the novel, opened the doors to a reconfiguration of my visual universe and to an intuitive need to materialize it through photographs. The decision to publish them exclusively on paper, in an edition comprising 25 photographs, reproduced in 10 numbered and signed copies, making a total of 250 reproductions, is, more than an aesthetic choice, a political statement. In a context of instantaneous and potentially infinite circulation of images, deliberately limiting their existence to a physical object, finite and subject to time, is to reject the logic of incessant reproduction and consumption. The 250 reproductions, incorporated into a limited edition, compel the image to return to matter, to slowness, to the intimacy of looking and to the contact of the object with the body.
Between the Interior and the Exterior: The Primordial Image
Every creative process is an intimate journey, marked by a dynamic tension between the visible world and interiority, made up of emotions, memories and perceptions. This relationship forms a continuous flow that shapes aesthetic and creative experience. The body is the very condition of perception, the place where subject and object emerge in relation to the world. Perception, therefore, is an act of involvement, in which images become active agents in a deeper understanding of ourselves. We might almost bring Merleau-Ponty’s concept, according to which ‘the body is at once seeing and visible’[5], into dialogue with Bachelard’s view[6] of the relationship between interior and exterior as a play of poetic imagination, with boundaries that are mobile and continually recreated through experience. The duality of inside and outside, interior and exterior, forms a play of contamination and ambiguity, in which boundaries blur and are continually rediscovered.
As I explained earlier, the triggers of my memory are almost always visual. The same is true of my imagination. Whether in architecture, writing or photography, everything begins with a diffuse impression, an imagistic nucleus that gradually gains density until it takes the form of a clear image. It appears without warning, like a seed sprouting from a silent place: the primordial image. This image results from an internalized reconfiguration of the exterior, a subjective reflux of something I feel to be absolutely mine and cannot name. It belongs to the world and to me at the same time. As Merleau-Ponty writes, it is ‘the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling makes possible’, an immanent visibility of my imagination.
The image emerges from a private bazaar in constant mutation, a dynamic collection of frames in which visual memory becomes poetic raw material, adjusting and recombining itself until it assumes a new form, with an identity of its own and new layers of meaning and emotional density. At this initial stage, everything is still intuition. My furtive gaze acts as an emotional and unconscious filter, determining, without my realizing it, what is absorbed and transformed. The primordial image is then composed through a subtle play of metamorphoses: a continuous flow between exterior and interior, in which memory and imagination contaminate one another, giving rise to an intimate and absolutely distinctive symbol. The primordial image is myself in the raw, pierced by beauty, diminished before its perfection, not knowing what I might offer it in return. It is a spasm of happiness and, at the same time, the awakening of creative anguish. But it is always from this image that the transition from the unconscious to narrative construction takes place, whether through drawing, writing or photography.
The photographic narrative O Naipe em Falta is a compilation of several images, juxtaposed and organized in such a way as to create a meaningful visual narrative. Some preceded the writing of the novel, others accompanied it and others were created after its publication. One of these photographs, which became the emblem of the work and was eventually chosen for the back cover of the novel of the same name, dates back to Hotel La Solitude. Within this dynamic between exterior and interior, there was a primordial image of a space that surfaced, captivated me and filled me with wonder. I knew that its origin was connected to real spaces that had left their mark on me, but the image already appeared altered, distanced from mere recollection. It was a new space, more symbolic than real.
The image evoked an atmosphere of intimacy and, at the same time, of emptiness or haunting. There was a table beside a window, laid for breakfast with cups, cutlery and napkins. The floor was a mixture of a chessboard and the zigzags of the room where David Lynch filmed the scene of the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks. The window was tall and illuminated the table like a spotlight, relegating everything else to semi-darkness. It was a scene of waiting, deserted, suspended in anticipation of the characters. They would arrive as isolated as the natural light isolated that solitary table. In the novel Hotel La Solitude, the three narrators intuitively choose it as though recognizing an inner place that already belonged to them:
Irene: ‘The floor is a chessboard, where pawns, bishops and knights, kings and queens cross paths every morning to satisfy their hunger.’
Luís: ‘I choose a table beside the window, overlooking the courtyard, and sit down to wait to be served. (…) I am not accustomed to the sophistication of places like this. The luxury almost oppresses me.’
Vasco: ‘As I wait, my eyes search for her everywhere. To my sadness, no signs of the bird of paradise come from the windows or the blue walls.’
After writing the novel, I tried to materialize the mental setting through a photograph. I chose the angle, waited for the right light and waited until the room was empty, until only the characters inhabited it, like ghosts. The real space became a phenomenological experience. Once physically reconstructed, the mental representation was transformed into a direct experience, imbued with meanings and emotions. The most intense of all, my love for the characters.
The photograph I produced was a reinterpretation of the experience of the space that inhabited the consciousness of the characters or, ultimately, my own. The table, the window and the light became expressions of an atmosphere, traces of a narrative intention. The space became a field of subjective experience, shaped by intention and by the act of perceiving. What remained was a feeling of expectation and solitude, in which emptiness did not signify absence, but potential, open to multiple narratives.
When I looked at the photograph for the first time, I asked myself this question: had the primordial image become complete or would there always be a creative tension that kept it unfinished? The answer was immediate: the photograph translates only one of its infinite possibilities. It is a fragment that touches one dimension of that imagined universe and opens itself to new readings, new derivations, mine and those of anyone who allows themselves to be seduced by it and feels within it the force that Roland Barthes called the punctum: ‘a kind of subtle off-frame, as though the image were projecting desire beyond what it allows us to see’[7].
The Image as a Driving Force: Contaminations Between Photography, Writing and Architecture
In the process of writing Hotel La Solitude, the relationship between word and image is a constant. At times, as in the example of the breakfast table, the primordial image emerges from that private bazaar of visual references, nourished by my sensibility. When I write from that image, narrating a scene or atmosphere, I feel an almost instinctive need to photograph it, to give it form, preserving the mental impression that gave rise to it before time dissolves it. At that moment, photography becomes a tool for retaining the visual essence, an urge to fix the sense of wonder before oblivion devours it, like a kind of crutch for memory, as Sontag wrote: ‘When someone catches sight of something beautiful, they often express their regret at not having been able to photograph it.’[8]
On other occasions, the process takes place in reverse. Any photograph, even one with no direct connection to what I am narrating, can trigger primordial images. These images, generated through the observation of a photograph, whether I was the photographer or someone else, are then transformed and recontextualized within the space of writing. Photography goes beyond the reflection of visible reality and becomes a point of departure for the imagination, which assigns it new meanings within the narrative.
It is revealing that, in both cases, the image plays a predominant role. In my creative process, written language is deeply permeated by a visual language, something that refers it back to a real form, to the realm of the visible, even though everything develops on the plane of imagination. Unconsciously, there seems to be a vital need for a connection to the world and to its concrete materiality.
I remember a scene in Hotel La Solitude which, in a certain sense, condenses these two paths of intuitive impressions that I try to make conscious. Irene, the character, sits on a bench in the garden surrounding the hotel and reflects at length on her marriage to António. At the beginning of the scene, she describes: ‘There is the red bench, leaning over the green and murky water, inviting lovers to watch the orange movement of the carp.’ She then develops the analepsis, moving through different stages of the couple’s life and, at the end, returns to the scene: ‘The carp continue to draw orange patches in the murky water of the pond, transporting me to a scene that might have emerged from a Turner painting, blurred and laconic, just as I feel at this moment.’
The entire episode involves a series of contaminations between memory, photographic image, mental imagery and narrative. The scene originates in a primordial image that I transformed into a photograph for the exhibition Tabacaria (2011), conceived in a context entirely different from that of Hotel La Solitude. Before writing it, I felt an inexplicable urge to look again at that photograph of the carp. At that moment, there was something in the orange movement, drawn through the green and greyish tones of the murky water, that evoked Irene’s gaze for me. The photograph became a symbolic point of ignition, triggering a chain of images that followed one another in my mind as I constructed the analepsis. The vivid orange, fading into the murky water, became a metaphor for the lost and irretrievable time that Irene was trying to recover, dissolving into a winding and nostalgic discourse, just like the movement of the carp. The narrative seemed to condense within the photograph, and the reverse was also true.
At the end, Irene returns to the same image and relates it to Turner’s painting. She remembers works such as The Fighting Temeraire or Venice at sunrise (from Hotel Europa), memories from my personal bazaar that I lent to her, in which the orange tones seem to suggest the same movement towards an ending and the same laconic quality that the blurred forms give to the paintings, similar in every respect to those in the atmosphere of the photograph of the carp. I wonder to what extent the powerful emotional impression that Turner’s paintings left on me during a trip to London may have echoed, years later, in the way I photographed the carp somewhere in Galicia and, later still, in Irene’s scene, in a cyclical play of contaminations.
This dialogue between image and writing comes close to the approaches of W. G. Sebald and Patti Smith, for whom photography goes beyond mere documentation. In Austerlitz, Sebald uses it to interrogate memory and reveal the fragility of what we remember. The photographs function as traces of the past, expand the narrative and suggest the impossibility of an objective truth. Similarly, Patti Smith, in Year of the Monkey, finds in photography both a record of the moment and what reverberates from it in the present, giving it a symbolic and evocative charge that goes beyond the real. For both, photography enlarges and expands the narrative through its unstable relationship with reality.
Like Sebald and Smith, I see photography as a means of exploring more complex layers of perception. For me, it functions as a mechanism for fixing memory, always subject to distortions, whether through the gaze behind the shutter, or through the creation of an archive, external and internal, of images and of the narratives that may emerge from them. Photography is, simultaneously, a trace of the real, a research document, a catalogue of memory, an artistic possibility and a narrative language.
In my process, however, the relationship between image and text assumes a different nature from the one I find in Sebald or Smith. The image infiltrates the writing and precedes it. Often, it acts as a creative detonator, expanding the narrative universe or giving it form. It is inside the text, it is part of its essence, even by virtue of the visual nature of my imagination. The image functions as the driving force of the text. Language is constantly reconsidered and reformulated as images, real or imagined, follow one another in the mind. Photography becomes a catalyst for the imagination, a creative spark that inspires, expands and transforms the writing.
In Hotel La Solitude, for example, the contamination between photography, memory and narrative manifests itself both in the structure of the text and in the language itself, which unconsciously assimilates the logic of the image. The multiple metaphors that emerge from the voices of the characters make this infiltration evident. Irene perceives her memories as ‘Muybridge frames’, a vertiginous succession in which each memory links itself to the next in an uncontrollable flow. Luís, as he runs his fingers over the photographs he received from Isabel, experiences in them a double trace, the image and the materiality of affection, the words on the back merging with the portrait: ‘I would caress her hair, running my finger over the photographs she sent me, filled with words of encouragement written in her handwriting on the back’. Vasco, in turn, sees his life projected as a succession of slides, in which each scene mechanically follows the next, fragmented, like a personal archive always ready to be re-examined: ‘The images follow one another to the rhythm of a slide projector: Grandfather and poor Jacinta, my wife and daughter, the former soldiers, the girls from the shop, the lady from the antique shop…’. Photography thus constitutes both a point of departure for the narrative, as I illustrated with the episode of the carp, and a presence inscribed in the very texture of the text. Language allows itself to be permeated by the same visual and mnemonic logic.
A similar process occurs in architecture, although with one essential difference. Here too, the point of departure is almost always a primordial image: a still diffuse spatial impression, made of light, matter, proportion, emptiness or atmosphere, which precedes any rational organization of the programme. But, if in photography I seek to fix or reinterpret an image and in writing I give it movement through narrative, in architecture it is drawing that first carries it into the visible world. The sketch functions as an initial translation of that interior space and as an anticipation of something yet to be built. The hand searches for what the imagination can only sense. Only afterwards come geometry, measurement, technique and construction. Here too, the image precedes language and rational thought. Drawing is the first material trace of an architecture still to come. Photography often participates in this process, feeding the same visual bazaar from which emerges the image that precedes the gesture.
I remember a process in which this chain of contaminations became more evident. For years, Ouve-me (Hear Me) (1979), by Helena Almeida, from the series Sente-me, Ouve-me, Vê-me (Feel Me, Hear Me, See Me), has remained in my memory. I am fascinated by the image of the face pressed against a translucent surface, that presence at once close and inaccessible, the body allowing itself to be seen without ever fully revealing itself. Later, when studying Steven Holl’s Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, I rediscovered a similar sensation in its translucent façades, through which bodies appeared as diffuse presences. In both cases, I was drawn to the intermediate territory between the visible and the hidden, a kind of immateriality in which forms can be perceived without their contours being clearly distinguished.
Years later, while developing the proposal for the Piraeus Cultural Coast Masterplan and Museum of Underwater Antiquities, in Athens, that memory returned already transformed. Given the building’s position in the port of Piraeus, I imagined it as a contemporary lighthouse, without formally mimicking the lighthouses of Antiquity. A cultural beacon, capable of signalling the arrival in the city of ships entering the harbour. I then developed a translucent skin that allowed the building, illuminated from within, to become at night a luminous body in the landscape. The solution was developed in all its technical aspects, from ventilation to thermal performance and lighting. The project, awarded the first honourable mention in the competition, was never built. It remained in the archive.
Some years later, during the design of the Church of the Divine Saviour, a different kind of problem arose. Neither the parish priest nor I wanted to build a bell tower. The parish church next door already had its tower, present in the landscape and in collective memory, and introducing a second vertical element would create a competition between them. The idea of a battle of bells between the two churches irritated us. The question remained: what could replace that vertical sign, that element of summons traditionally associated with the bell tower?
The answer came one Saturday afternoon, at home, while I was listening to Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. I began to imagine myself inside the nave of the church, which did not even exist, as though I were sitting at a concert. I could see the walls, the space, the light and, above them, a translucent body appeared, similar to the one I had developed years earlier for the museum in Athens. The technical solution would come later. At that moment, I saw it there. It was one of those primordial images that arise before any rational formulation, condensing references, memories and intuitions whose origin I can only reconstruct later. At that moment I understood that the bell tower could call through light. A vertical and luminous presence that would mark the church in the landscape, recovering something of the symbolic force of the ancient Egyptian obelisks without reproducing their form.
On Monday, when I returned to the studio, I began to develop through drawing what I had seen in my mind. The image gradually became architecture, subjected to geometry, proportion, matter and the demands of construction. From it came the translucent clerestory that today rises above the nave of the Church of the Divine Saviour. What for years had existed as the memory of other images, then as a solution within an unbuilt project and finally as a fleeting vision of a church that did not exist found material form.
Only retrospectively can I reconstruct part of this journey: Helena Almeida, Steven Holl, Athens, the project kept in the archive, Mahler and, finally, the church. I cannot say where the memory of each reference ends and invention begins. That boundary probably does not even exist. Helena Almeida summoned me to listen, Steven Holl gave architectural form to that presence and Mahler made me hear it. The form that emerged no longer belongs to any of them. The references had been transformed and contaminated by one another until they could no longer be isolated, giving rise to a primordial image that I felt to be my own. Images remain, contaminate one another and transform themselves, their origin becoming indistinct until they return, sometimes many years later, in a form we feel to be our own. In this case, an image that had fascinated me for years because of its condition as a veiled presence became a built element: an architecture that trades the call of sound for that of light.
Curiously, the most iconic photograph of the building is not mine, but Alexander Bogorodskiy’s. It is another artist’s gaze upon my work, a new perception added to the journey. Perhaps one day I will return to the clerestory myself with a camera, in search of other forms and other framings that may enter the narrative of a novel.
Baudelaire’s Echo or the Unfinished Imagination?
My creative process, whether in writing, photography or architecture, develops through the interdependence between the inner world and the outer world. The primordial image, a concept I have been developing, may be understood as a mental condensation of that movement: an intuitive, fluid, ambiguous and subjective visual impression, prior to reason or language. It lies at the basis of that movement, representing the confluence between personal identity and the complexity of the visible. In the beginning was not the Word: it was the image.
The primordial image is born from the body, from that sensory experience of the world described by Merleau-Ponty, and inhabits that ‘half-open’[9] human territory of which Bachelard speaks, where interior and exterior contaminate one another. Perhaps this is the point of departure for what Deleuze understands as art: a singular reconfiguration of experience that transcends the creative self. The primordial image is simultaneously an impulse of the imagination and a summons to attentive looking and to listening to the world. To receive its oneiric and creative potential, we need to place ourselves in a state of rest and silence that allows contemplation.
This need for stillness takes on particular importance in the face of the visual saturation and incessant proliferation of images described by Virilio. If reflection is the new scarce commodity, the great challenge of our time will be to recover freedom of perception and re-educate the gaze, restoring a poetic space that seems to be slipping away. Imagination and memory need that interval. Creativity is nourished by the way we learn to inhabit images and set them free. Defending the time of looking and of thought thus becomes an act of resistance and a way of preserving the richness of human experience.
It is at this point that Baudelaire’s echo returns. Photography may, at first sight, appear to threaten this creative dynamic. According to Susan Sontag, photographs serve to ‘immobilize and imprison’ reality, which we consider rebellious and inaccessible, or to enlarge a reality we experience as withdrawn, ephemeral and distant. We may possess images and be possessed by them, thereby returning to the sensation of ‘unreality and remoteness from the real’.[10]
By interrupting the flow of the world, photography offers us a crystallized fragment, filtered through the camera lens and the photographer’s perception. It is precisely in this distancing that photography approaches the creative spark of the primordial image. Freed from immediate experience, the image acquires a symbolic and oneiric charge and becomes raw material for the imagination. The photographic fragment thus becomes a territory of possibilities, in which perception expands and the experience of the real is reconfigured.
Photography is, for me, a sensitive interpretation of lived space. By photographing a setting, I transform it into an extension of experience through imagination. The photographic narrative O Naipe em Falta arises from this relationship with the visible and proposes a parallel drift alongside the novel of the same name. The images preserve the openness of memory and imagination, coexisting with the word as mobile signs, available for new relationships and new meanings. Photography does not corroborate the novel, does not make it more real, nor does it confine it to an autobiographical reading. It brings to the fore the malleability of memory and imagination.
Between photography, writing and architecture, the primordial image circulates and transforms itself. In photography, it may fix or reinterpret an impression; in writing, it gains movement through narrative; in architecture, it finds in drawing the first material anticipation of a space yet to come into being. Photography, word and sketch thus become different ways of giving form to the same need for a relationship with the world. The image remains in motion, contaminating languages and successively opening up new possibilities.
In the same text in which Baudelaire accuses photography of condemning imagination to death, he offers the reader a provocation: ‘Meanwhile, to imagine is a joy, and to express what one imagines is a glory. But what am I saying! Does anyone know that joy?’[11] The question appears in an ironic and disenchanted tone, as though that joy were under threat in a world surrendered to the mechanical reproduction of reality. Imagination, however, transforms itself before the image. If photography freezes an instant, it also releases it from the flow of time, turning it into malleable material for memory and creation. By fixing the ephemeral, it paradoxically opens a path towards the unfinished, towards that which may be reread and reinvented.
The threat lies in the saturation that dulls the gaze and reduces perception to an automatism. Faced with it, we must reclaim the time of contemplation, silence and drifting, spaces in which imagination can breathe. Photography, writing and drawing displace the world and reinvent it. Perhaps the joy of which Baudelaire speaks survives precisely in that movement: furtive, intermittent, impossible to capture in its entirety. To reach it, we must learn once again to see beyond the surface and find, in the interval between images, words and forms, the spark of creativity. Perhaps no one truly knows it because it is always in process, nourished by its own impossibility of ever being complete.
I recognize as my most accomplished works those that remain closest to the primordial image that gave rise to them, preserving the intensity, openness and wonder that prompted me to begin them. Not infrequently, when people refer to my photographic work, my books and even architecture, the most concrete of my forms of expression, I hear comments of this kind: ‘In your work, it seems that nothing ever closes, there is always something about to happen.’ It is a comment that makes me particularly happy, a sign that what I produce remains open to the experience of those who receive it. It is also a sign that I remain in process: the work is never finished; it is always waiting for the next one to broaden or shift its meaning.
Imagination remains unfinished because it is, essentially, movement. As Bachelard writes, ‘it is the most natural faculty there is’.[12] Nothing is fixed; everything is discourse, direction or meaning.
References:
[1] BAUDELAIRE, Charles, ‘The Modern Public and Photography’ [‘O Público Moderno e a Fotografia’], Salon 1859, in Oeuvres Complètes, revised edition by C. Pichois, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961.
[2] SONTAG, Susan, On Photography [Ensaios sobre fotografia], Quetzal, Lisbon, 2012. p. 170
[3] VIRILIO, Paul, Open Sky [A velocidade de libertação], Relógio D’Água, Lisbon, 2000. pp. 123-138
[4] DELEUZE, Gilles, Proust and Signs [Proust e os signos], Barco Bêbado, Lisbon, 2022. pp. 68-114
[5] MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice, The Eye and the Mind [O olho e o espírito], Vega, 3rd edition, 2000. pp. 19-32
[6] BACHELARD, Gaston, The Poetics of Space [A poética do espaço], Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2000. pp. 189-214
[7] BARTHES, Roland, Camera Lucida [A câmara clara], Edições 70, Lisbon, 2003. p. 85
[8] SONTAG, Susan, On Photography [Ensaios sobre fotografia], Quetzal, Lisbon, 2012. p. 87
[9] BACHELARD, Gaston, The Poetics of Space [A poética do espaço], Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2000. p. 225
[10] SONTAG, Susan, On Photography [Ensaios sobre fotografia], Quetzal, Lisbon, 2012. pp. 159-161
[11] BAUDELAIRE, Charles, ‘The Modern Public and Photography’ [‘O Público Moderno e a Fotografia’], Salon 1859, in Oeuvres Complètes, revised edition by C. Pichois, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961.
[12] BACHELARD, Gaston, The Poetics of Space [A poética do espaço], Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2000. p. 228
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