REFLECTION [back]

ROMANTIC PORTO's GARDENS (1991)

COLLECTIVE MEMORIES

Little Romantic Gardens were commonplace in my student days. They were places that people were not consciously aware of, but they used them. For getting some fresh air, for courting, for reading, for passing the time, for feeding the ducks and swans... They were safe, and well kept by the City Council and by all who used them. They were an inheritance from another time.

The garden at Arca d'Água with its small lake and romantic grotto; the SMAS Garden, belonging to the Water Company, which was collecting Porto's 19th Century water fontains, after piped mains water arrived in different parts of the city; the Passeio Alegre Garden in Foz, where my grandfather and great uncles would go, dressed up, to walk on their short stays at North Portugal's capital, at the beginning of the 20th Century; the gardens of the Crystal Palace, whose name resisted the passing of time, even after the building ceased to exist. And so many more: at St. Làzaro, in Cordoaria, the gardens in the Praça da Republica and at the Boavista Roundabout, and the “quasi-garden” in Avenida dos Aliados! And so on. Water is almost a constant in these places. Wellsprings and fountains, water-spouts, small ponds and man-made structures, etc.

In 1991, I returned to these gardens, this time to photograph them. Returning awoke my memories. The troubled period of the 1974 revolution had not disfigured them. The link was instantaneous.

More recently I have revisited these memories on several occasions for projects of another nature, and I found some of these places that have not suffered the ravishes of time. But I suffer when I see the replacement of these oases of collective memory by spaces "empty" of feeling and emotion, that so empty my soul and that of so many fellow countrymen.

Júlio de Matos
January, 5th 2009

Notes: Some of the photographs from this series are part of the private collection of the IEFP (Portuguese Professional Training and Employment Institute). They were also published pictures from the book "O Tripé da Imagem - Fotógrafos do Porto" published on the occasion of Porto 2001 - Capital of Culture. I am still revising this project, still unfinished.