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
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
