All the photographs by Luís Palma in the CAM collection (inventory numbers 90FP122, 90FP123, 90FP124, 90FP125, 90FP126, 90FP127 and 90FP128) are from the series Dia Acabado, Sol Apagado [The Day Ends, The Sun Sets], exhibited at the Galeria Graça Fonseca in May 1990. They were selected by photography critic and historian Pedro Miguel Frade (1960-1992), who knew the artist’s work well. Luís Palma commenced his carreer in the 1980s, with his first solo exhibition – Estados Unidos da Imagem [United States of the Image] – in 1988, in the Galeria Roma e Pavia, in Porto.

 

This group of images, characterised by dark tones in which traces, shadows, landscape, alienation and the feeling of a journey (which functions almost as an necessary catharsis) predominate, are typical of an early phase in Luís Palma’s photography career. In order to understand these images, it is helpful to consider the artist’s main references, who found in figures such as the Portuguese photographers Paulo Nozolino and Jorge Molder and the American Robert Frank (b. 1924) a formal and conceptual register which to a certain extent influenced him. Of equal importance, in contextualising this group of works, is the interview the artist gave in the Portuguese art magazine Artes e Leilões,* a few months before the exhibition at Galeria Graça Fonseca. In this interview, as well as mentioning the importance in his work of the journey and of ‘photography as automatic writing’ – in which the photographer allows himself to be surprised by the outcome of the printed images – Luís Palma concludes that he is just as interested in text, associated with a poetics of post-punk music, and the ‘attempt to endow insignificant moments with significance’.

 

This group of ideas was successfully summarised by the artist in the dedication he made at the end of the exhibition catalogue for Dia Acabado, Sol Apagado:

‘The music of Violent Femmes and Nick Cave form part of my emotions – journeys – the desire to travel and to hold on to its trivialities. That is what I dedicate this work to.

April 1990’

 

* Pedro Miguel Frade, ‘Conversa com Luis Palma’, in Artes e Leilões, 1 (2), December 1989/January 1990, p. 34-36.

 

 

 

JO

 

September 2011