A noite magoa

The nature of the being is filled with layers of heaven and hell, apexes, never-ending deserts. There are those who agonise over their toothpaste first thing in the morning and those who agonise over the hours passing so slowly, turned into days, ruminated into years, digested into lives. There are those who delude themselves with ideals, those who idealise delusions, those who dwell on imperfection, those who do not let themselves dwell. There are those who find smiles in setbacks and those who counter smiles for the deception of reason. There are the advocates of ‘yes’, the unfailing supporters of ‘no’. There are those who like sweets, those who prefer savouries, those who enjoy walking barefoot and those who like wearing shoes. There are people of faith and renegades, those in exile and those from council, those who are from nowhere, those who are refugees, the libertines, the besieged, those in excess, those in danger of extinction, the good, the bad, the so-so. There are those who fit into the collective and those who are strangers even unto themselves. There are those who know how to swim in the social pool, those who walk on the thick magma of people, those who drown in the void. There are the rich and the poor, the wretched, the underprivileged, the hippies, the yuppies, the calm, the nervous, the unifiers, the sectarians, the brilliant, the dull, the travellers, the trapped, the fidgety, the quiet , those who yearn for the day, those who pray for the night, the sleepwalkers, the insomniacs, those who control and those who are controlled, the obedient, the disoriented, the disobedient, the defendants of fate, of the occasional, the intellectuals , the obscure, the bright, the victims, the aggressors, the castrators and the castrated, the wicked and the pious, the greedy, the generous, the sincere and the liars, the prey, the hunters, the trophies. There are the attentive, the oblivious, the thoughtful, the outraged, the furious, the indifferent, the negligent, the thoughtful, the egocentric and the philanthropic, the doting and the extreme, the contagious, the infected, the satisfied, the avid, the direct, the stumbling, the insurgent, the reverent, the inspired, the deserted, the simple, the complex, the physical, the mental, the urban, the rural, the introspective, the testifiers, those who are lost and those who were found. There are the scheming, the sensorial, the nomadic, the sedentary, the entrepreneurs, the lazy, the dispossessed, the vain, the perspicacious, the distracted, the beatified, the lustful, the loyal, the disloyal, the stubborn, the considerate, the exciting, the boring, the cruel, the magnanimous, the naive, the cynical, the sincere, the hypocrites, the benevolent, the malevolent, the narcissistic, the benefactors, the assertive, the sarcastic, the stable, the drastic, the altruistic, the monogamous, the polygamous, the monotheistic, the polytheistic, the masters and the slaves, the radicals, the moderates, the registered, those of the norm, the tramps, the gifted, the gregarious, the isolated, the contesters, the contested, the usurpers, the usurped, the rapists, the raped, the conquerors, the conquered, the affable and those of wrath, those who like petals, those who prefer latex. There are the party lovers, the ones who like to be celebrated, the worshippers, the worshipped. the nihilists, the sufferers, the promised, the soulless, the salvific, those of catharsis, the prophetic, those who long for the past, the protected, the vulnerable, conspicuous, codified, allergic, immune, neurotic, sensible, indomitable, catatonic, endemic, remainders, invaded, evaded, transgressors, colonisers, despotic, sophistic, the trash and the sweepers, the students and the teachers, reducers, encompassing, owners, indigents, acephalous, insurgents, liquidators, consenting parties, the ‘perhaps’, the absolutely, the creators, the perfectionists, the convergent, the divergent, the idiots, the loan sharks, the empathic, the drastic, the magicians, the mythomaniacs, the agnostic, the impressive, the faithless, the depressive, the prevailing, opaque, transparent, intact, inconsequential, eidetic, linear, those of light, those of blackout. There are the ones who transcend each of their natures, those who surpass their every greatness, those who become more beautiful than beauty itself, those who descend from their reminiscences, those who allow themselves to be overtaken by each of their weaknesses, those unable to go, those unable to stay. There are the hysterical, the esoteric, the catastrophists, those of maintenance, the hyperbolic, the situationists. There are those who move forwards, those who move backwards, those who prove themselves, those who reduce themselves, the smart-asses, the thick, the foolish and the morons, the mutants, the needy, the wizards, the resilient, the shepherds and the sheep, the indoctrinators and the indoctrinated, the cold-blooded and the short-fused, those who dance in the rain and those who flog a dead horse, the filthy, the spotless, the neat, the scruffy, the nuisances, the settled, the ugly, the beautiful, the true and the false, the chicken, the brave, the calculating, the thoughtful, the upright, the iniquitous, the attractive, the repulsive, the assertive, the hesitant, the extroverts and the shy, the plausible, the insecure, the digital, the analogue, the surreal, the pathological, the transcendental and the translogical, the insane, the sane, the bizarre, the conventional, decent, indecent, toxic, loyal, the decadent, the whole, the unbreakable, the quitters, the blind, the visionaries, the sensitive and the brutes, those of rule, those of exception, the beasts, the crystals. There are people out there who are so fragile they can endure all kinds of nightmares without a woe. And people who are so strong, they’re intolerant to the simplest breeze of misfortune. There are people who like to be handcuffed and those who like to handcuff others. There are absolute people and relative people, unpolluted people, corruptible people, there are the self-serving and the selfless, the intense, the detached, the urgent, the postponable, the pungent, the feasible, those who confess, the contemptible, the perpetual, the fleeting, the universal, the home-lovers, the restrained, the exacerbated, the romantic and the purists, the eccentric, the cerebral, the contemporary, the ancestral, the erudite, the unreal, the forbidden, the admissible, the damned, the remissible. There are people who remain in others and other people who simply dissolve where they are. There are people who achieve nothing and others who attain extraordinary things. There are people who die in poverty and others who die filthy rich. There are things that cannot be explained and others that can be explained. There are people who like rice. There are people who listen to entire symphonies while sleeping and those who listen to nothing but nothing in their sleep. There are those who build allegories and those who inhabit nightmares. There are people who can't stand ties and others who hang themselves with them. There are the dystopian, the slaves, the freed. There are those who overuse aerosols, those who undergo plastic surgeries, those who like custard tarts, those who inject Botox. Some people were born to be young, others to be old. There are the stationary and the revolutionary. There are the philosophers, the apostles, the shits, the cool, the crooked, the straight, those who theorise about the end, those who believe in a fresh start. There are people who like to taste like every flavour and people who like to have no flavour at all. There are voices that visit us in our dreams, others that don't. There are people who like porridge and people who like mushrooms. There are people who like to think, people who like to sit down, people who like to stop, people who like to never be present. There are people who amplify themselves, others who reduce themselves, those who never stay, those who never go. There are loads of yins out there, yangs galore. There are nights, there are days, there are extreme opposites that attract, promised souls, all manner of opportunities waiting for their thief. There are people who like to wake up very early and others who like to sleep in. There are people who are giving, people who are private, captivating, unfriendly, approachable, unapproachable. There are people who distrust everything and others who trust nothing. There are people who are absolutely fine passing by nobody and others who manage to pass by everybody. There are people who don't like people, people who only like some people, people who only like themselves, people who only want to be liked. There are people who turn their life into a religion. And other people who spend their lives in denial. There are those of luxury, the disenfranchised, those who like wine, those who like bicycles, those who know their neighbours through Google Earth and those who bring them a piece of cake, those who die early, those who arrive late. Some people like pets. Others are pets. There are addicts and abstainers, debutants, recidivists, believers and non-believers, devout, agnostics. There are people devoted to the moon, others who lie down in the sun. There are people who like to read at dusk. There are people who are allergic to lactose. There are people who find hidden meanings in words, others who find them in figures. There are people who like balloons, slippers, spices, artefacts. There are people who like vinyl records, there are people who like pizzas, burgers, mashed potatoes. There are those who like isolation and those who enjoy company. While some know the Koran by heart, others memorise the New Testament. There are people who control lipids and proteins. There are people who need carbohydrates. There are people who believe in water, others who believe in the wind, others in earth, others in fire, others in the sky. Some people believe in nature. Some people believe in knowledge. There are the theoreticians, the empiricists, the frivolous, the hedonists. There are people who can dance till they drop and others unable to dance a step. There are people who pursue harmony, others, utopia. And there is an incredible stock of people to whom these prosaic indulgences are not allowed, whom the opuscules of prejudice enclose within their metaphysical walls, as their own prisoners, surrounded by paradoxes of individual freedom, in perpetual synaesthesia with reason, where truth becomes a dystopian version of reality, a kind of impossibility that the collective plays in a strange form of social egoism: dreamers. Dreamers are the most fragile and strongest of beings. They possess a wonderful, almost Neolithic thing: magical thinking. They exercise their freedom in the darkest beauty, blossoming like magnolias in the infinite desert of people. The voice inside, restless, lost in the sounds of thought, lost in a labyrinth of silences, in a labyrinth of skin. The words appear as if they were secretly whispered from another mind, becoming clear, briefly, like neon visitations, leaving like maids fading out into the darkness, where instruments rest, as if they were memories, like divinities in a senseless medieval state. Quietness is a utopia, as legitimate as silence, as real as that feeling of belonging to no body, no soul, no place. We are all born for all and for nobody; we keep intoning the melody of life, decomposing the most egalitarian of compositions. This might be one of the only decent manifestations of equality, in living memory and beyond. In the land of Humanity, the individual is less than an atom, universe dust, designation of animal origin, without possible salvation or hermeneutics. The most pronounced characteristic of solitude is its universality. A tear has a neutral PH between 7.0 and 7.4. Pain is indefinable. It is inopportune. It is an objective synoptic table. It is shadow. Meaning. Emotional loop. It is what is not. The intangible that stays. The eyes tear through darkness, as if heavy vaults of sky were falling on stage. The metabolic expression of an incredible, unyielding strength that only dreamers recognise. That is why they are strong. That is why they are fragile. They seem bigger than time, bigger than life, solely craving for it, with the voracious hunger of dreamers. That's it, but that's not all that makes them different. What makes them different is the complexity of their innocence, the melody of their smile, the way they transport us to our true nature, the way they so clearly present us with a system of possibilities. The way they give themselves, the way they give - in their disarming generosity - what has been withheld from them so many times. One day, they discovered their nature in music and, in it, a sublime demonstration of unequivocal love, of true art. How wonderful it is to observe them. An immense, unifying, gregarious energy, stronger than any sect of subjectivities, detonating through each and every pore within the soul, in cosmic waves of fellowship. A bewitching osmosis functioning like a limbic system, in haptics of sound. Music, in its brotherhood, in its interculturalism, in its pure expression. The fury through which they release their sweetness, eliciting the choreography of the days. Seeing them is like stopping time in its transcendent speed, like a bird flapping its wings to hover over a place. There are dreamers and dreamers. Only the best dreamers manage to subvert the world into the same thing. Their beauty is endless, truly multidimensional. Their beauty lies in the beauty of their innocence, the opposite being true and, the truth, a more beautiful, purer, harder thing. Their innocence sometimes makes them prey to the most unsuspecting predators. Yet, this is the most ambiguous nature of beings. Our inability to be like them. We are never able to give as we receive. There is no retribution, no possible tribute to their genuine kindness, their art. They are the tribute, a tribute to our limitations, to this concentric world where we walk and they fly. They don't need a tribute, they need others to be just like them. They are not an object; they are not a moment, a clipping, an aesthetic, a light in the light, a framework, a single dimension. They are more than just a person, they are families, they are memories, they are congregated lives, people in communion, sound, expression. Complete and uncluttered, that is how they give themselves. That’s what their incredible beauty is like. Capturing it is only possible if we free our gaze towards what cannot be seen. Deep down, at the bottom of the still waters of this recreational society of ours, there is a kind of praiseworthy elitism, almost as dangerous as primal prejudice. Deep down, having that bottom as a background, it’s just flogging a dead horse. The being is completely inexplicable, almost as ambiguous as pain. The being is a stage. A place without a place, multipolar, where all natures exist again. The nature of things and beings is something magnificent when they are crystal clear, as they are. Time is psychedelic. There are no prisons. There are no prisoners. So it is: There are those who merely fly. Those who fly over them. And those who let themselves be flown over. The siege, as always, besieges those who besiege. Luís Pedro Cabral Translation: Tânia Simões Proofreading: Jacqueline Sarbib

The voice in the head

The voice in the head is a photographic essay by Valter Vinagre. The work was done in Vila Nova da Barquinha in 2015, during the first artistic residency organized by the Center for Contemporary Art Studies (CEAC ) and the municipality of Vila Nova da Barquinha.

Animais de estimação

Life in death There are photographs that insist on treading the thorniest, least obvious paths. These kinds of photos revel in provocation, suggestion, irony and artfulness, without ever having to resort to floral gameplaying or Baroque zigzags. This is not about taking the bend at speed to see if the vehicle can take it; it’s about taking the bend just for the pleasure of the skid, to go at the limit and watch the dust rising. Valter Vinagre is one of those photographers. They asked him for the breath of life and he gave them the gaping mouth of death. They asked him to take the pulse of nature and he gave them glassy eyes and tongues sticky with varnish. They asked him to celebrate the unstoppable dynamic of biological diversity and he gave them the monotony of taxidermy in its attempts to wound time, staunching it with a terrifying expression, with a body that is a mere capsule of nothing. The series Pets (Animais de Estimação) acquired form (and life!) following an invitation to the collective kameraphoto to participate in the E.C0 2010 initiative in Madrid, which brought together photographs from twenty collectives from Europe and South America. And yes, in the midst of all the other images of living nature were these theatrical still life shots, which powerfully evoked a much broader idea of nature in all its infinitude and complexity. There are photographs like that - which cannot be corrected. And that is for our good. What was the challenge that launched this work? It was to photograph some subject related to biodiversity in Portugal. Various collectives from different countries in Europe and South America were invited. Is taxidermy an endangered activity? Was it easy to find people that devote their lives to it? No. Most of them are already very old. I met one person that was still doing it at 80 or so years of age. He was always criticising people that took up the work without really knowing what they were doing. What gave you the idea to focus on this kind of “wildlife”, which still survives in many Portuguese homes? I can never say exactly when the idea for a big job arises. When I was working on this project, I tried to recall the moment when the subject crossed my mind and made me think, but I can’t isolate it. The theme of death, of “rabid dogs”, a certain sense of decay has always been with me… I wanted to record human obstinacy, the need we all feel to try to perpetuate memories, in this case natural memories in danger of extinction. When this challenge was put to us [kameraphoto] and we began to discuss what we should do, I immediately thought of those stuffed animals that you so often see in cafes. And so I went out looking for them in more private spaces. For this group of thirteen pictures, I ended up choosing only one that had been taken in a cafe. The others were all taken in private spaces. This series could, of course, also be read as the antithesis of biodiversity, if we understand the term in its more restricted notion of the totality of all species and living things in their ecosystems… This counterpoint with the suggested subject pleases me. There’s also a certain irony with regard to the title of the series, Pets, considering that these were actually wild animals which ended up being tamed after death. They were loved by people and were therefore embalmed and not destroyed. In some cases, they were domestic animals that the owners wanted to immortalize in this way. Another extraordinary thing is that this activity may actually limit biodiversity even more, given the hunt for rare and exotic animals to embalm… Yes, it’s true. But there’s a curious thing: this activity has become increasingly rare because of a law concerning it. A rumour went around that you couldn’t keep stuffed animals in your home if they were endangered species, and so many people threw away those that they had and the activity itself suffered… Ironically, this means that some stuffed animals may be doubly rare. There are few that have actually been done well, and most of those are in museums. It also seems to be saying: “Watch out! One day, this’ll be the only way we’ll be able to see a particular species…” Yes. There’s an aspect of this work that functions as a kind of warning. What about your approach? All this taxidermy stuff is a bit kitsch… It’s very kitsch. As well as the animals, I also wanted to show something of their surroundings. I’m interested in the memory of places, environments in which things appear and are constructed. The series as a whole offers a frightening landscape, reminiscent of Z-movies. Although these animals are “tamed”, they look ominous, aggressive. This is emphasised by use of flash, so that it seems like you’ve caught them in flagrante in their natural habitat… It’s also a way of emphasising the illusion of life that embalming tries to create. On the other hand, by showing part of the scene where they’re presented, I also refer to their domestic –and definitively domesticated - side. They’re being used like ornaments. Are you going to shoot more of this kind of thing or will you finish with this series? Yes, I’m going to keep on. The subject interests me a lot. For now, I want to continue shooting in the Beira-Baixa region. The subject is biodiversity, but this is more about death than life… It’s more about death, clearly. I didn’t want go into the hunting trophy side, but more into the attachment that people show for these objects, which were live animals before they were decorative objects. A short conversation between Sérgio B. Gomes and Valter Vinagre about the exhibition Pets. May 2010.

Barra das Almas

How are we to represent time? How, through an image, can we convey such a fleeting and elusive concept, which we experience in words as duration, movement and change, and yet which seems so intimately bound up with our very being that we are unable to achieve enough distance to properly comprehend it? As we peruse this series of photographs, “Barra das Almas” by Valter Vinagre, we know instinctively that, despite their recent date, they hark back to a time that is not our own – a pre-modern age, when lives were not yet governed by machines and when the hours and days were regulated by ancient calendars. There are no mature men and women in these pictures – only an elderly couple, and a child, adorned with fruit like a young pagan god reopening the cycle of life, which, we guess, is soon to close. Everything in these pictures seems to be marking time in Barra das Almas, just as it would be in any other remote abandoned village in a country that has been forced to forget the roots that once sustained it. When Valter Vinagre visited this place, he decided to document the life of a small rural community on the verge of extinction. Now integrated into a Europe of globalized agriculture where smallholdings are no longer competitive, the countryside, as we once knew it, is gradually giving way to tracts of uncultivated wasteland, large-scale farming operations run by faceless managers, and ruined properties about to be sold off to conglomerates that will build spas and resorts designed to provide temporary relief from the stress of city life. In today’s world, in this European continent where we live, Barra das Almas, and hundreds of other villages like it, waits patiently for its end, knowing that when the last couple departs, with them will go the memories of living off the land, of a (now sterile) lore that was once passed from generation to generation, of a way of being in life, and a way of experiencing space and time. Ultimately, it is space and time that we are dealing with here in this language particular to photography. Through the unique gaze of Valter Vinagre, it speaks of the forthcoming end of a world without touching or focusing upon the agents responsible for its demise. In these images of the couple that still live in Barra das Almas, there are no references to machines or mass production, or to anything at all related to this new way of farming that uses the land without respect and decency, without work done with the hands – the work of digging, watering, sowing, killing, harvesting… This is, therefore, another time. We perceive it as a space – a space far from the city in which we live – for there is no other way of conceiving time. How much time does it take to travel the distance that separates us from Barra das Almas? Probably much more than the hundreds of kilometres marked on the map (a measure we have invented to situate ourselves in a territory but which says nothing about the symbolic world that we find here). This is a world made up of the four elements – earth, air, water, fire… though one of them can only be guessed from the direction of a flag billowing in the wind or the smoke wafting away from a fire. And even these elements are constantly crossed by signs of death: a knife, the decomposing corpse of a dog, the pig-killing bench, meat laid out on a table… Or, in two or three pictures, by the crossed lines formed by rough hands that could equally be those of a man or a woman. Although modern and contemporary art has always been fascinated by the movement of time, the sense of change that accompanies it is totally absent from the “Barra das Almas” series. Here we are much closer to the iconography of the medieval Book of Hours (which used images of labour or of country scenes to illustrate the prayers to be offered at different hours of the day) than, for example, to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, one of the modernist attempts to imprison time. The time depicted here is cyclical, just as it would have been a thousand years ago. We guess that the seasons follow on one from another, and that each task – from the planting to the pruning of the olive tree – is performed for reasons that have more to do with the slow march of time around the sun than with the dictates of the market value of fruit. We may also guess (leading ultimately to the same thing) that the house we see, the pitcher in the corner and the carefully combed hair are identical to others, centuries-old, that disappeared before they could be recorded by photography. This is, therefore, a time (with pictures manifested in it) that is awaiting in its slowness the inevitable coup de grâce. Meanwhile, the days, seasons, years follow on from each other, always the same – or almost – right up to the end. Luísa Soares de Oliveira

MOUTH

Through our mouths we ingest everything that is necessary and vital for our survival - air and nourishment. Through our mouths we also ingest death – through viruses, bacteria, and poisons. Through our mouths issue orders of death and words of life. Through our mouths issue expressions of repulsion or admiration. Through our mouths issue the books that we read and those that we see. The mouth is not just a "vital organ", it also the central site of our on-stage representations and the "site" of images conceived and realised by me. MOUTH is the central site of my work from the books of Rui Nunes and the world that surrounds me/us. Valter Vinagre Mucifal, Colares. 22 April 2020

Where are you from?

Where are you from? is the question asked of anyone who crosses a border. It is a phrase that reminds us of illegal or legal migration/immigration. It is a reminder of our status as foreigners/strangers. The borders we encounter are both real and imaginary.

Of the nature of things

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.” [Diane Arbus] In this sequence of images realised by Valter Vinagre, between 1999 e 2003, the photographer has captured an object which remits us to an idea of intimacy – a mattress – always in the same place, lost and displaced in a natural landscape getting that way transformed in an unexplainable and dissonant reality. The photographer went back to this place, deliberately, during 5 years, searching for significance and wishing to build the testimony image of a consonance between that object and the landscape. This search was unfruitful and the images have remained as if encapsulated in a drift of real significance. Although the documental significance of these images remains unrevealed and unknown, its path of sensible exploration, this rescue, now, from the time and place of its production, incorporates in it an expanded “punctum”. The significance of these images is not isolated anymore, absorbed in itself, it meets, although in a non premeditated way, a body of work, posterior, of capture of human remnants in the landscape, through marginal experiences connected to prostitution. Only photography allows this complex elaboration of the significances beyond their temporal nature and matrix context, as a privileged medium of, in the heart of reality, making that same reality derive to the territory of contradiction and of its own impossibility. That way, this sequence of images is revelatory of the conflict that photography has always had with the reality representation. Its historical and ontological ability for revealing and testifying has been facing, from the beginning, the significance and reality ghosts who do not let themselves be captured or whose trajectory remains undefined and volatile. Valter Vinagre proceeds always a labour of the contradictory visibility, through a continued research of the remnant image, or what the philosopher Jacques Rancière designates as “effect in the place of cause”, protecting any image of its easy voyeuristic condition. Therefore, the possibility of representing through the demand made to the spectator of having the hard and difficult task of elaborating a sensible image is the condition of these images. To look is today one of the most complex systems of contemporary culture, and the images are the ones that execute the liberty of its significances which can make us more political, before the reality that they give back to us. Emília Tavares. Lisbon, 2016

Inside you

Valter Vinagre's work focuses on a critical analysis of the human condition, directing the viewer's reflections towards the contiguity of our vital horizons with failure. Much of his work abounds with themes that allude to uprooting, social alienation and ruin as a metonymic scenario for the collapse of individual dignity. These photographs present the daily lives of homeless people through the settings they inhabit. They show places as metaphors for their forced resilience. But they also aim to be a mirror of how the majority of the population sees those who have been expelled from society: anonymous spectres who, despite being present in the daily life of the city, become invisible. The improvised spaces where they shelter are the silent account of a subsistence, of a circular journey full of wounds and scars, which took them from the precariousness of their origins to the nothingness of their present. The ruins are an elliptical portrait of the changes that society has undergone, particularly the working class. The dismantling of the industrial fabric that flourished during the 20th century on the outskirts of cities gave rise to what are known as working-class belts. These infrastructures were gradually abandoned due to the implementation of technological advances and the relocation of factories, now reinstalled in countries offering lower wage costs. What remains of these neighbourhoods, these suburbs that contained an autonomous social ecosystem, are the traces of a past way of life and abandoned architecture. Alejandro Castellote, Lisboa.2023 To carry out the work of capturing images, Valter Vinagre had the support of the street teams of the CRESCER Association.

Despedido

Despedido was created in 2007, when the photographer documented the destruction of the Feira Popular amusement park in Lisbon, obtaining access authorisation from the managing entity, Braga Parques. The symbolism of the place, as a democratisation of recreational space, and the huge controversy that arose from the council's decision in 2003 to close it down, justified this last look at the ruins of what had once been the Fair. It was also a question of documenting yet another transformation of the city's public space, yielding to the pressure of property speculation. While wandering through the vast space, Valter Vinagre found, among the various rubble, a set of records of the employees of the company Divertimentos Mecânicos Águia, which operated on the premises. The fortuitous encounter with this documentary material immediately gave a new and complementary approach to that place and some of its protagonists. (...) (...) In this project, Valter Vinagre renegotiates the documentary nature of the images, because he removes any universalist reading of their meaning and places them in a strategic documentary narrative, as models of a specific statement of destruction of the social fabric. In fact, he reverses the immediate values of image perception, for example, when he interferes with one of the original documents by erasing some identifying data, including the photograph, highlighting the core meaning of the phrase handwritten in red on one of the files: ‘This employee will not return to work at this firm’ ‘Dismissed’. Implicit in the invective of the sentence is a discretionary power to hire and fire, which evokes the precariousness of the condition of those workers and a broader social threat to their fundamental rights. The gallery of anonymous workers spans several generations and must refer to the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Also significant is the absence of women from this documentary universe, with only one female image standing out in the collection. Despedido not only reflects on the social changes of contemporary capitalism, but is also linked to a historical matrix of photography as social struggle. And it is this reinvented matrix that elucidates and renders operative many of the documentary statements of contemporary photography. (...) In “The Struggle of Photography with Reality” Emília Tavares. 2022

Inscription

Seeing the Valley from within... from the inside out, keeping it closed in on itself. Seeing from the inside out was my commitment, my inscription. The Valley has a long history of marginalisation and exclusion, inscribed in decades and decades of abandonment. The outside view is marked by feelings of rejection. Those who come from outside are seen before they see. Those who live and work here have their own codes of protection. It is certain that the Valley will be swallowed up by concrete, by the devastating fury of property developers. This is how the City plans to include the Valley and be able to sleep peacefully. Valter Vinagre, 25 March 2021

Percebes

The images I present in Percebes were taken over three years in Figueira da Foz during the Gliding Barnacles festival, at the invitation of friends who organise it. I wandered between the beach and the garage in the city centre, photographing and searching. Searching for and photographing his cast of protagonists and characters. It is in this geography and environment that I situate my sea within a culture that was foreign to me—surfing. Valter Vinagre. Senhora da Graça, Idanha-a-Nova. June 2020

Posto de trabalho

The garden of forking paths Woods and forests, places held as sacred by all cultures, but particularly cherished in the Mediterranean or Northern European worlds, can, however, be quite different among themselves: havens of peace and kindness or haunts of unfamiliarity and fear. Gentle springs, welcoming shades, luminous clearings, delicate melodies from birds or magical beings suffused with joyous eroticism, intricate, near-impenetrable masses of vegetation, sharp cliffs, dark lairs of wild animals, freezing winds and imperilled bodies are all mental images of a symbolic duality that is also geographical and physical, reflecting such divisions as mild and harsh climates, night and day, enchantment and curse. Places of pleasure or pain, real-world models of a mythical Arcadia or Scythia. These photographs were taken by Valter Vinagre in the woods and forests of Portugal, a country described by geographers as combining Atlantic and Mediterranean features, and placed by certain empirical anthropologists somewhere in a crossroads of Celtic, Germanic, Classic and Muslim cultures. And yet, these places hold no memories of fairies or elves: folk traditions and their erudite literary formulations people them instead with witches and enchanted Moorish princesses, hunting knights and goat-footed ladies, melancholy shepherds and elusive or jocose shepherdesses. However, the woods in these photographs seem to place us in a different reality, quite distant from the lyrical or bucolic ones we have just described. If we wish to preserve the mythical garden metaphor, we must realise that these are neither paradisiacal gardens nor hellish places – they are simply devastated spaces, remote from any possibility of consecration or curse. In these locations, where no 'philosopher's cabin' can ever be built, new anthropological readings of natural reality emerge, distancing us from the traditional rapport of the human and the supernatural with nature. We are looking at natural locations showing signs of occupancy; and, since no figure is seen in them, we could also entertain the hypothesis of their being occupied by magical entities that avoid the presence of a human gaze. But it quickly becomes clear that that absence is due to the fact that these are settings for actions whose level of degradation would make it impossible to a human gaze to bear the judgement of another human gaze. We are looking at places that have been devastated, not by a natural catastrophe (a fire, a storm, a flood) or even by a human one (acts of war or sheer vandalism): their devastation manifests through the degradation of the very objects and materials that make up these settings. Each object seems to not belong in the space in which it is found, and appears to fulfill the role attributed to it not out of a sense of usefulness and appropriateness to that function, but rather by taking the meaning out of the space in which it is inscribed, out of its original function, and casting it into the abyss of abjection. Trees hold up draperies that conceal and frame unrecorded actions, cushions and blankets await the bodies that have left on them the painful traces of a brief stay – what could be the stage setting for a theatrical, balletic, pictorial, photographic or poetic composition is nothing more than the temporarily abandoned scene of ignominious deeds. A multitude of other objects and materials is scattered across the space, over the pine-needles and soil, over the cushions and cloths, displaying themselves not as fragments of an exploded reality but as debris from that reality, trash – rather than a touch of light, the white of the crumpled tissues is the most conspicuous sign of that soiled reality. The stage lighting created by Valter Vinagre for his photographing of each scenery highlights the difference between how one looks at a certain reality and how one lives in that reality – and that was the photographer's intention: to show the other side of the legends and natural charms of woods and forests; to tell of a denaturalised and denatured nature, whose temporary inhabitants must quickly abandon it, not for any magical reasons but due to social fears; here, there are no ivory towers, only dark pits where princesses (of every colour and faith) find themselves imprisoned by a social system (the one ruling illegal immigration and prostitution) rather than by a spell; there are no knights to save them, only pimps and clients (themselves undergoing degradation), who cast them further down these pits, where the ladies' beauty will soon disappear or has long faded away, replaced with sickness or deformity, just as fear, greed, hatred or revenge have replaced the sweetness in their eyes. All this can (not) be seen in Valter Vinagre's photos. The more carefully composed (how is it possible to find beauty in the composition of these squalid tableaux?), the more delicately lighted (how is it possible to apply such a pictorial light to the volumes of such a real space?), the more aesthetically thought-out (how is it possible to show without anger such hellish, repulsive settings?) they are, the more the photographer is able to teach us to see the wretchedness they contain. It is not a matter of choosing between two constantly forking paths: we must choose both – the path of photography as an autonomous practice; and the one of photography as a discourse of denunciation – both provide us with useful means to approach these works. Lisbon, 25 March 2015 João Pinharanda