Augusto Alves da Silva was nominated for the BES PHOTO 2006 award with Rainbow, a work recently acquired for the CAM collection. When the artist exhibited this photograph, which is more than two metres wide, in the CCB, he placed a bench opposite to allow people to take their time looking at it. The gallery attendant told him that those who stayed longest were the elderly, which pleased the artist.

The image was captured in 2001, in Iceland, on the same trip on which he photographed part of the Shelter series (a series of 35 photos taken in Portugal and Iceland) (see text by Emília Tavares).

On a fenced platform that serves as a viewpoint (perhaps on a ship, but next to the sea at any rate, as indicated by the life buoy), someone is taking a photograph of an enormous, almost vertical rainbow, next to which we can make out a toned-down double in the thick veil of fog.

The white railing divides the space into two large territories: a safe harbour and an area suited to escape and fantasy. The overwhelming light that catches our eye is the work of nature, but in the composition of the photograph it is the work of a fixed perspective and the dazzling visual sensitivity that is offered.

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Technical perfectionism in the realisation and conditions of perception of the photographs is a constant concern for the artist – so as to preserve and defend aesthetic emotion, alongside the maximum efficacy of the image. As Emília Tavares writes, ‘the formal purism approaches that of the German school. The rigidity of the framing clashes with the contemplative metaphors of the landscape and any plausible relationship is deluded. The documentary limits of the photograph are expanded, the images relate the abstract to the real, the natural to the built.’

We are positioned as the observer of someone who, in the photograph, is observing and photographing, as well as of that which is being observed, at the distance of an interrogation about its degree of truth, construction and verisimilitude. Whether a real or ‘fabricated’ setting – or the happy coexistence of both – this is a place suspended between journey and memory, the stopping of time and the exaltation of a visual experience repeatedly recombined in the present.