There is a clear formal similarity between this image, produced in 1985, and Dafundo, taken by the same photographer in 1956, and also part of the CAM collection. This similarity led Fernando Gil to discuss these two images, as if they formed a diptych, in the introductory text to the exhibition catalogue Insignificâncias: Fotografias de Gérard Castello Lopes [Trifles: Photographs by Gérard Castello Lopes], presented in 1986 at the Gulbenkian Foundation. However, even if there are elements common to both images (the puddles, the reflections, the cat, the road) there is an element whose absence distinguishes them: in Escócia [Scotland], there is no direct reference to human life, represented in Dafundo by the washing line.

 

This absence is in fact symptomatic of a clear divide between Castello-Lopes’ recent work and his engaged and humanistic photography of the 1950s, when he travelled the country documenting, in the manner of Cartier-Bresson, the people of the provinces and bearing witness to their ‘sadness and despair’ during the difficult years of Salazar’s dictatorship. When he resumed photography in 1982, after a long interruption, his interest had turned to the ‘paradox of reality’. This phase entails a more poetic vision of photography, concerned with preserving the innocence of one’s first visual impression of reality, free from the conventions imposed on it by knowledge. As Castello-Lopes stated: ‘what we know diminishes or extinguishes the awe which the beauty of the world should inspire in us.’*

 

This image rises from this ‘awe’ of a visual encounter with a landscape which, in its apparent banality, compels the photographer to record it at that particular moment rather than any other.

 

 

* Gérard Castello-Lopes, Reflexões Sobre Fotografia: Eu, A Fotografia. Os Outros, Lisbon: Assirio & Alvim, 2004, p.27.

JO

 

August 2011