June 24, 2007
Keep Clear
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December 05, 2005
Christmas Escherism
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November 10, 2005
Plagiarism :-)
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October 10, 2005
Green
ExperimentaDesign's Lounging Space, Sta. Catarina, Lisboa
A reflection on a Chinatown ad. San Francisco.
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September 29, 2005
Torel
An umbrella-like iron structure above a bench at the Jardim do Torel, Lisboa.
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September 14, 2005
The Mirror
Taken at Swallowtail. A specialty interior design shop on Polk St., San Francisco
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September 02, 2005
Fake B&W
It looks like a B&W photo but it was actually a very gray day at Stinson Beach, San Francisco.
What I've learned about how to cope with San Francisco weather: Layers of clothing.
It can be freezing in the morning;
then the sun comes out: you remove a layer;
the wind stops: you remove another layer;
the fog crawls in: you put on a layer;
the wind starts blowing: you put on the last layer and pray it doesn't get any colder.
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August 30, 2005
Escape aka The Perfume Ad Shot
Stinton Beach, San Francisco
A woman wearing a bikini is escaping from R's dreams.
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August 10, 2005
Collage
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July 11, 2005
Summer days
Guincho, Portugal
It doesn't look like it but Sunday was a warm summer day. A thick fog covered the sea.
note to self: you drive way too fast when you're alone. The music is always playing too loud when you're driving alone. In order to avoid further embarrassment, remember to lower the volume before stopping at the tollbooth, especially if you're listening to Nouvelle Vague's version of "Too drunk to fuck". (and remember to return the borrowed CD)
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July 07, 2005
Bird Watching
Bandia, Senegal
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July 05, 2005
lisbonphoto 2005 - Aaron Siskind
"When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder)." - Aaron Siskind
Note to self: never wear high heels to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga again. The sound of your footsteps is magnified a hundred times by the aged wooden floor and high ceilings, making it feel like a giant is clumping about the halls laden with paintings of agonizing Christs.
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May 31, 2005
Bernd and Hilla Becher
"Vernacular industrialized architecture has been the sole subject of Bernd and Hilla Becher's work for some forty years. Their vast photographic inventory now ranges geographically from western Europe through North America and taxonomically across an enormous array of heterogeneous building types, many verging on obsolescence—mine shafts, lime kilns, silos, cooling towers, blast furnaces, tipples, gasometers—all classified by reference to function. (...) Once husband and wife started working together, in 1957, they assumed identical roles: tasks are not separately assigned to one or the other; both are involved in scouting sites, negotiating with the owners and other authorities, setting up the cameras, and printing. The art they have produced does not fall within conventional categories of documentary photography, though it has many affiliations with that long-standing tradition. The disciplined ethic with which this dedicated German couple defined, then refined, their project of recording for posterity the increasingly neglected relics of the industrial era, with its domestic offshoots, has yielded not just an aesthetic but a vision.
Typically, their works present each industrial motif in what soon evolved into a rigorous, disciplined signature manner whose focus is an exploration of the relation between the subject's function and the resulting photographic representation. Isolated, centered, and frontally framed, each motif is shot in as objective a manner as possible. The combination of large-format cameras and finely grained black-and-white film ensures a remarkable tonal range in each print. By working only under slightly overcast skies and early in the morning during the seasons of spring and fall, the Bechers are ensured of an even, diffuse light with minimal shadows, a lambent ambience that enhances their intensive focus on the motif, which is revealed in crystalline detail, grounded in a formal factual clarity. All anecdotal incident, such as intrusive foliage, stray animals, and humans, is sedulously avoided: nothing disturbs the systematic ascetic neutrality. Tellingly, the vantage point tends to be subtly elevated. "Looking at an object from a point half way up it [causes] it to appear before you in its full reach and free of distortion," they explain.2 The raised camera position also causes the horizon to appear to recede, the surroundings to become more panoramic, and the object to stand forth prominently so that, while clearly related to its environment, it simultaneously appears somewhat removed, apart, an effect enhanced by the expansive neutral skies. The results evidence a brilliant understanding of scale relations—of how a vast structure can be made to fit a small-sized pictorial format—without rhetoric or expressive distortion.
By the mid-1960s the Bechers had also settled on a preferred presentational mode: the grid. Groupings of prints, each print measuring sixteen by twelve inches or smaller, either framed discretely or encased within a single large frame, facilitate direct, immediate comparison between motifs, which are arrayed without hierarchy, according to type, function, and/or material. Juxtaposition permits industrial structures that at first might appear prevailingly similar, even uniform, to register as significantly different one from another. Given that most viewers know little about the economic, engineering, and functional requirements that determine the generic forms and characters of these structures, comparison of the several components in any of these multipartite works operates primarily at a formal level—that is, in an aesthetic dimension."
excerpt from an essay by Lynne Cooke
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May 12, 2005
Wall
Mural painting near Pablo Neruda's house in Santiago de Chile
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May 03, 2005
Don't walk too fast
Easter procession in Lima, Peru
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May 01, 2005
La Bombonera
La Bombonera, Boca Juniors Football Stadium - the day before the club's 100th birthday.
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April 13, 2005
The narcissistic blogger
Hotel, Lima -Peru
Enoteca on San Cristóbal Hill, a great window over Santiago de Chile
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April 11, 2005
Peru Photos
The photo album is here!
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April 06, 2005
Favourite
Favourite photo from the whole trip...
Baby carried on mother's back, peeping out! Pisaq, Peru
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March 16, 2005
Kaleidoscopical
Crystal chandelier on a corridor, seen from below, Casa de Serralves, Porto
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March 02, 2005
Fishes
Cascais, Marina
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February 28, 2005
The Graphoscope
My latest acquisition at a flea market: a graphoscope. As far as my research goes (if one can call research to googling for antique online auctions), it was actually a bargain.
The large magnifying lens' purpose is to watch details in photographs and the two smaller ones are supposed to work as a stereoscope.
The fun part of this antique gadget is actually the stereoscope! This means I'll have to start collecting sterographs (I only bought three with it)...and I've seen some great ones on sale on ebay.
"A stereograph is simply a simultaneous double-image of the same subject that, when viewed through a stereoscope like the one pictured here, appears to be one three-dimensional photograph. Stereographs are made by a single camera with two lenses set approximately two-and-a-half inches apart--about the same distance as that between the eyes. The viewer places the stereograph in the wire slots in the holder and then looks through the two lenses, moving the holder back or forth until the single three-dimensional image is in focus. Like lithography, stereography was of great importance in the mass production and distribution of images in the nineteenth century. The technique dates to the 1830s, but popular interest in the stereograph took off with improvements in photography and the development in Britain of a simple and easy-to-use viewer, which caught Queen Victoria's eye and the attention of the world when it was displayed at the 1851 London Crystal Palace."
More about graphoscopes and stereoscopes here and here.
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February 24, 2005
Looking down
Hotel, Madrid
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February 22, 2005
Ramón Masats
I felt ARCO'05 was a bit disappointing. Maybe my expectations were too high since last year was an immense pleasure to wonder through miles and miles of creative stuff.
Anyway, if I had to say something positive about it, I'd say that at least I got see some of the work of a spanish photographer previously unknown to me: Ramón Masats.
Two of my favourites:
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February 18, 2005
Black and White
While I was in Madrid last weekend there was a huge fire at the highest skyscraper in town, the Windsor Tower, in the financial district that started on Saturday night.
The building was still fuming on Sunday afternoon and there was a terrible traffic jam at Castellana because the police didn't allow any cars to go by. The Windsor Tower was completely burned down, making the Picasso Tower look whiter and brighter.
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January 26, 2005
Saber mirar
Saber mirar es un sistema completamente nuevo de agrimensura espiritual. Saber mirar es un modo de inventar. E no existe invención tan pura como aquella que ha creado la mirada anestésica de ojo limpíssimo, ausente de pestañas, del Zeiss: destilado e atento, imposible a la floración rosada de la conjuntivitis.
La fotografia, como pura creación del espíritu (1927), Salvador Dalí
Knowing how to look is a completely new system of spiritual surveying. Knowing how to look is a way of inventing. And there isn’t a purer invention as the one created by the anesthetic glance of the most clean eye, absent of eyelashes, that is the Zeiss: distilled and attentive, impossible to the pink flowering of the conjuntivitis.
Photography, as a pure creation of the spirit (1927), Salvador Dalí
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November 26, 2004
The Window
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September 06, 2004
Shopping in India
Rule #1 Every price is negotiable.
Rule #2 Bargaining is mandatory.
There is no such thing as simply going inside a shop, buying an item and leaving. Every acquisition is painfully long and demands skills that I obviously lacked but during these weeks in India I had excellent training.
Favourite lines:
"You are such a beautiful lady, you need a beautiful saree!"
"My daughter! Can I call you my daughter? Look at the quality of the weaving on this carpet!"
"God gives me the opportunity to give you a 30% discount!"
"With this pashmina shawl you'll look like Miss India!"
"You want a 25% discount?!?! Look at this! It's so cheap for you! You come from Europe!"
"Don't walk here at night; it's not safe to go any further than my shop."
"You have such a sweet face and this colour looks so good on you; I'll give you a 5% discount"
"This is for your mother? I have a mother too and because I have a soft heart, I'll give you a 10% discount"
Fun ads and signs in India. Another Photoalbum here.
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September 27, 2003
Praia do Meco
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The Morning
Lisbon at sunrise; view from the Sheraton Hotel, 24th floor.
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September 24, 2003
Pleasure & Pain
The greek philosopher Epicurus (342-270 BC) is commonly associated with hedonism. He believed that the greatest good was to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. It sounds really common sense, doesn't it?
According to Epicurus, what prevents us from being happy is anxiety; no matter how rich you are, if you're anxious to earn more money, you won't be happy.
The way to avoid anxiety is to "Don't fear god, don't worry about death; what's good is easy to get, and what's terrible is easy to endure." (Philodemus of Gadara)
It seems to me that Epicurus was the first self-help propaganda writer of all time! :-)
Which leads to things such as The Hedonic Society of America who appear to have sensible beliefs:
* Knowledge is gained through reasoned study of all available evidence.
* In the absence of conclusive evidence for a supernatural, ethics and morality must be based on our living in the natural world
* Pleasure and pain are our natural means for determining what is beneficial or harmful to life.
* Those actions are best which lead to the greatest pleasure and happiness, or the least pain and suffering, in the long term for all concerned.
* Our lives are made most happy and fulfilling by cultivating the higher pleasures of intellectual development, aesthetic appreciation and creativity, and social bonds of friendship, family and romantic love.
* Happiness is best attained in an atmosphere of freedom, tolerance, nonviolence and diversity.
Epicurus even gets his own fanclub centuries afer his death! :-)
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September 22, 2003
Poets
It's not everyday that you see the two most famous portuguese poets together :-)
The bronze sculpture is Camões and the one on the painting in the back is Fernando Pessoa.
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September 20, 2003
A Tree in Alentejo
I spent a couple of days in the Alentejo... and this tree caught my attention!
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