“My images are clear and what they depict is recognisable. They are, in a certain way, similar to what an amateur photographer tries to do when he brings photographs from his travels to show his friends: images which are, at first sight, focused and well-framed – not half of a door handle or a windowsill. I want my images, being apparently crystalline, to be able to attract all people and then to confuse them. If they are confused it means that they are thinking. Maybe they start not taking for granted what lies before them.”

These words by Augusto Alves da Silva (b. 1963), in an interview with Ricardo Nicolau, function almost as a disclaimer to spectators less informed about the author’s work, summing up in a few words the many things that can be said about this artist’s oeuvre.

In fact, in their apparent banality, his images are a reflection on the very photographic codes and genres (landscape, portrait, photo-reportage, documentary, fashion) which Augusto Alves da Silva covers in his different projects, claiming that “I always thought the division of photography by styles and genres to be absurd, like portrait, nude, landscape, architecture, […] the landscape that I photograph fascinates me as something from which many signs of a given society can be read”.**

This way, a group of beautiful landscape images might conceal a political connotation, such as in 3.16 (2003), or simply contradict its beauty with the banality of a live radio speech, as in Ibéria (2009), just two examples of the necessity to explore the practice of looking in more plural discourses, anchored not in the stereotypes of genre but in the detail, the sequence, in the montage of the photographs that compose the series.

The author’s images hail from the immediate and the familiar, to consequently displace the fragility of perception towards a geography of relationships inscribed in an understanding of the discovery of the unexpected, the accidental, or of the “misencounter”.

In the images of 272B9 we see two landscapes of waterfronts, which we can easily associate with dusk and noon light, although that does not determine or identify the location. The sequence of landscapes is then disrupted by a portrait on the right-side image, in which someone paints her lips with a lipstick whose reference (272B9) gives the triptych its title, thus displacing all the importance from the monumental landscape to the little detail of the lipstick.

The lack of references in this image does not give us any starting point to determine whether the photograph of the figure was taken in the same location as the landscapes or elsewhere, suspending the possible narrative dimension of the work.

This uncertainty only assails the spectator because the author placed it in a dialectical function with the landscape in this triptych.

The image apparently alien to the series thus becomes the anchor image of the triptych, in the sense that it introduces a disturbance, promotes a fracture, responding to Augusto Alves da Silva’s process: “Ultimately, I attempt to build a kind of photographic universe where, without renouncing sophistication, anyone can from the outset see something he or she might identify with. Afterwards, I introduce forms of interference between images the images.”*** As such, he can be placed in line with the cinematographic reference of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage by conflict****, as a dynamic that generates new formulations.

 

JO
May 2012

 

 * NICOLAU, Ricardo (2007), “Há Casas Feias nos Açores”, in  AAVV (2007). BES Photo 2006 [cat.], Lisboa: Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém / Banco Espírito Santo, p. 29.

**Interview with João Fernandes and Ricardo Nicolau, in FERNANDES, João  (curator) (2009), Augusto Alves da Silva: Sem Saída – Ensaio sobre o Optimismo [cat.], Porto: Fundação de Serralves, p. 48.

*** NICOLAU, Ricardo (2007), “Há Casas Feias nos Açores”, in  AAVV (2007). BES Photo 2006 [cat.], Lisboa: Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém / Banco Espírito Santo, p. 29.

**** EISENSTEIN, Sergei (1929/2007). “Montage is Conflict”, in COMPANY, David (ed.) (2007). The Cinematic, Londres; Cambridge (MA): Whitechapel Gallery; MIT Press, pp. 30-32.