Fernando Pessoa - 'A Mailman's Nirvana'Fernando Pessoa was Portugal’s supreme literary figure with Camões. He lived from 1888 until 1935 and was Modernist in outlook and style. He was one of the most enigmatic writers of all times, one of the most intimate, only comparable to Franz Kafka. In his prose work entitled The Book of Disquiet, we have a series of random fragments that constitute a kind of confession, revelation, that were put together by scholars after his passing. They take place on and around the street in downtown Lisboa where he worked and lived, Douradores Street. One of my purposes in undertaking this project was to search for the roots of his disquiet, in the quarter where he developed it. The buildings were in their great majority the same ones, and the people, at least the ‘types’, seemed to still exist. There were no longer horse-drawn street cars, nor did cell phones exist in his times. From
my literary background I wanted to capture in images the spirit, feeling,
and essential qualities of his writing, but not exactly corresponding
to concrete passages in the book. I felt the image created by academics
in their investigations was not true to the real person. Just the
opposite, Pessoa had been turned into an eccentric and esoteric, rather
than a normal person who sometimes dreams, doubts, is often confused,
introspective, and who is spiritually curious. My photographs recreate
what led him to be what he was. There are more than 50 18x24 cm prints
in the collection
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
