Everyday, we are faced with images that don’t cease to impress us with their beauty.
The waves of the sea, even in days with little light; the fire flames, with their ever-changing forms; the tree leafs, with their varied shapes, that sing songs with the wind; the bright and warm red, that persist to come out of the ground…
“A stop at what goes by” intends, through a set of photographs, to awaken the senses to an aesthetic side of the realities / objects that, because they belong to our everyday life, are usually unappreciated.
The roof of a ruined house; a dry leaf on the edge of the road; an undefined shadow; the skeleton of a machine on a quarry; a green-less palm tree fallen on the ground…
By breaking the barrier between the explicit and the occult beauty, “A stop at what goes by”, challenges the viewer to stop and give life to what is apparently lost; stop, and try to have a more incise look at what surrounds you.
Filipe Condado
Facing things once again, the photographer gets ready. He checks the instruments, the light, the slow sliding of the cloud. He looks at things in front of the camera, throwing himself towards the fatal, final click, and – zero. Suddenly, things are emptied out, they don’t give him back anything anymore. Suddenly, all things are the same, zeroed, un-unique. Everything matterless. Everything empty. From things, only names remain – face, house, tree, spaceship – and names are not photographable. It’s the end (so to speak). In face of this evidence, the photographer can’t do anything really. He packs all the technology, returns home oh so sad. And clouds keep crossing the sky, and the anonymous nothing repeats itself over and over again, for several days, for too long. Until, almost with no conscience of his own gestures, he decides to kill things. To remove them from their places and names, to enter them, to kill them. But it’s not the end (so to speak). Only once after they’re dead, will things be things.
Jacinto Lucas Pires