joão – New Landscape Photography

JoãoHenriques.com

There is always a subjective aspect in landscape, something in the picture that tells us as much about what is in front of the camera, and who is behind it. — Robert Adams

The inspiration to make these pictures came through this phrase from Robert Adams, a photographer whose pictures were part of the New Topographics exhibition of the 1970’s, in which some paradigms of landscape photography were questioned. The phrase also sums up beautifully the paradox of subjectivity and objectivity in photography.

These images depict the city where I live, Torres Vedras, one of them illustrating specific characteristic of this territory, in its planning, use, morphology, the other having been made immediately after the first, at its opposed plane of 180 degrees. From the second picture comes an aleatory, non-thought, non-determined photography, the pair granting an unexpected association and contrast between the identity of the place, as well as referencing ontological aspects of photography linked to objectivity, subjectivity, and canons of aesthetic reception of the landscape.

— João Henriques, Torres Vedras, Portugal

JoãoPedroMachado.com

Ephemeral Landscape is focused on the reservoir created when the Lindoso dam was built, in which the waters reached farming fields and villages in both Portuguese and Spanish territory.

 The word “ephemeral” embraces everything that is transient or of short duration. There are in nature ephemeral creatures whose existence lasts only a day. It was also nature that revealed the banks of the Lima River once forgotten, revealing the memories drowned under the cold and dark waters — that through photography became infinite and then disappeared again.

What caused this event was the extreme and unprecedented drought that took place in the Iberian Peninsula in the year 2017. Some say that it was the result of a one-off event, others show a certain concern. Be that as it may, there has been a manifestation of the climate changing that causes transformations in the landscape, shortening distances between countries and referring us to a global problem that knows no borders.

Spanish and Portuguese riverbanks appear side by side and witness the resurgence of this landscape with no sky, only with the dark blue of the water and the dry white of the banks of the river.

— João Pedro Machado, Portugal