REFLECTION [back]

GHOST CITY (2006)

FRUSTRATION

This place could have been a Young Gods Playground. There was something about it that instantly took over me. It was not about making beautiful photos of a place. I am not interest in that. It was about making each encounter, a long and lasting visual conversation.
It was about an interaction …

I started photographing… minutes later I heard in the distance the horn of a bus…

I just remember to run back to, with my camera, tripod, bags, and sweat a lot. Temperature was high. I was the last to return to the bus and no one from that group of photographers really understood why. I could had stayed there for hours, but we had to move on, to another larger, maybe more imposing place, but not so open to individual vision. At least to mine.

Like the methaphor of the man that died of thirst close to the water, I was so close to fulfill myself. I feel the loss of the visual experiences I was not allowed to have. It is very complicated to travel with a group of photographers, just because we all See differently. And no one of them was interested in the same things I saw. So my memory of that place recalls in me a sense of frustration.

This is the first finished image of a short series made in 2006 on a Xinjiang desert place, in China. Being impractical to return, I wish now to revisit my raw negatives and go again through the selection process and Printing Process.

Júlio de Matos
May, 20th 2009