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April, 2009

November, 2009

This short text is the edited version of a personal reflection that I wrote by invitation to "auto comment on your arts and on your photographic artistic attitude of yourself." It was published both in English and Mandarin in the "JOURNEY - Júlio de Matos Photographic Exhibition" catalogue, at Beijing Showgood International Art Museum, last November.

MY VISION

I prefer to work alone. In my understanding photography is an highly individual activity. That allows me to think and concentrate better in what I am doing and avoid being distracted and lose focus in my picture taking process. I don’t particularly like to make avoidable compromises in art.

But I don’t see myself a lonely person. I enjoyed and still enjoy teaching. I founded the first university level Course of Photography that now, more than 25 years later, still is there. Teaching is one of the few occasions where group photographic activities may accelerate exponentially the learning process. Collective criticism can be fundamental at this stage.

It is possible to keep on reinventing one self in the course of our limited time alive on Earth. But I also believe that our early years are fundamental throughout our entire life. Now I think I know how much I owe to my parents, and all the mind eyes they opened in me.

Early in my life I became interested on the effects of Time and how it affects peoples and cultures. I was much interested in the previous cultures that had occupied the territory I lived in. Since my late teens I have been traveling in and contacting other countries and cultures outside Portugal. First in Europe, then North and South America, Africa, and for almost 20 years Asia. After my 40’s I started making photographic essays about things, places and cultures where time is the edge. My first book and major essay “Heaven's Door - Manikarnika Ghat” was about a very old city in India where time seams to be on a stand still. “Ta Prohm - The Memory of the World” was photographed in Cambodia, about a culture that vanished. In 2005 photographing Beijing’s Hutongs became a passion. This project is about the old urban life in Beijing that is changing rapidly mostly due to accelerated pace of change in modern China. “Casas de Brasileiro” my latest project on this matter, is about a culture that disappeared In Portugal, but left behind the physical evidence of its short lived but glorious past. It deals with memory and a romantic personal fantasy vision of my country.

Each photographic project I conceive and make tends to have its own atmosphere and visual distinctive approach. I feel free to break with my past work and explore new visual directions. It is my way of balancing a playful and creative attitude with the serious subject matters I decided to approach.

My Personal Vision comes from the synthesis of my own history and other personal experiences. Everything I have done and learned becomes the engine of what comes next. That is why not only my past dictates my future, but the present, what I do today, may affect forever My Vision and have the potential for allowing me to grow as an artist and most of all as a human being.

Júlio de Matos
Beijing, November 2009

March, 2010

REFLECTION #3 - FLAT WATER

This text is a reflection that I wrote by invitation to present Flat Water project to the chinese public. It will be published in Mandarin in the April 2010 issue of the chinese Beijing based FOTO-VIDEO magazine.

FLAT WATER

Flat Water is an ongoing photography project, begun in 2007 in Northern Portugal. Actually I am still photographing with this project in mind.

In 2008 I wrote down these 3 statements that summarize in a condensed way my thinking and approach to this project:

1 - The two-dimensionality and horizontality of the water surface when calm. Water as an initial concept of mirror, which later generated the concept of mirror with a memory.

2 - The two-dimensionality of the photographic print, and its apparent three-dimensionality caused by our uncontrolled capacity to decode photographic information as a window on reality.

3 - The two-dimensionality of the graphic artifacts juxtaposed with pixel accuracy on the surface of the photograph, could question the apparent three-dimensionality of the image as it challenges the eye to a mental exercise in perceptive reconciliation.

Now allow me to explain a little:

The photographic print is a two dimensional reality. Although we to tend to look to a “print” and most of the times interpret it as a window in a 3D world. But the real fact is that a “print” is just a flat surface. It is well known fact that there were tribal peoples found that lived outside of our cultural universe, that were incapable of interpreting a photographic print of a space with receding background. Only after being taught how to read a photographic print, they reach another level of using the information contained on a photograph.

We are so automatized and conditioned in our way of looking and reading images, be them in Prints, in Magazines, in Movies, in TV, in Computers, (…) It is really an huge intellectual effort to see the two dimensional reality in photos depicting the three dimensional world. Because photography is an art that most of the times deals with the “real” world, and we have grown in a visual culture hyper-abundant with pictures, we normally just cannot see those images as a two dimensional information. It is something that is beyond our control.

When I draw in my computer those small lines that are digitally rigorous and abstract on their organization, because they do not intend to reproduce any object or emotion, we all are obliged to look into that information the same way we look when we read a text on a piece of paper. And suddenly what was apparently three dimensional becomes shapes, colors and two dimensional almost abstract forms.

For me, as an artist, it was a challenge making that happen on the surface of a landscape photograph, that deals with the the concept of the surface of water, that when calm is horizontal and two-dimensional and sometimes mirror like. This idea association made me recall the initial concept of Photography: the Mirror with Memory.

Júlio de Matos
Porto, March 2010