Tag: black and white photography

[between worlds]

Photography

BETWEEN WORLDS

Windows open passages to what the eye can reach, but also to that which remains hidden. Distinct realities intertwine within an uncertain territory, where each seems to hold traces of the other. Light passes through the glass, revealing forms and casting shadows, yet without dispelling every mystery. Amidst presences that persist and figures that dissolve into motion, the world reveals its fleeting nature. What vanishes leaves traces behind; what remains is no longer exactly what it once was. There are presences that survive in this way—on the fringes of the visible—silently traversing time and memory.

Photograph selected for the open call of the 2nd International Photography Festival in Campos do Jordão, SP, Brazil, under the theme “Crystal Window”; the work will be presented as part of a collective projection during the event, which takes place from November 6–8, 2026.

{rêver, imaginer et spéculer sur les future}

diptych, Photography

I am very happy and honored, as a photographer, to be part of this exhibition titled *RÊVER, IMAGINER ET SPÉCULER SUR LES FUTURS*.
Congratulations to the curators—Gabriela Sá and Gláucia Nogueira, who led the *Foto em Pauta 2026* open call and also curated the event in Paris—as well as to the entire committee for both initiatives.
My photograph (a self-portrait in the form of a diptych) is featured on one of the event’s promotional pages (shown below).
I cannot thank you enough.

Note: This diptych is part of my second photography book, titled Assombrações (Hauntings), published in 2023. It is an independent, bilingual (Portuguese and English) production, curated by Roberto Cecato (Studio Imaginar, São Paulo, Brazil). The book is available for purchase; you may order a copy by sending an email to the address provided here on my WordPress site.

[irreparabile tempus]

diptych, Photography

Irreparabile Tempus(*)
(on the impossibility of reversing time and decline)

In this diptych, the aged bark of a tree transforms into flesh to enact the very concept of tempus fugit—time’s flight.
In a visceral autopsy of existence, the upper image petrifies the mind into a face contorted in agony, while the lower image shows a pair of worn-out legs buckling under the weight of gravity.
Enveloped in the pitch-black darkness of a tenebrism inherited from the Baroque, the work strips away our illusions of eternity and returns us to the state of a still life: fragile matter that cracks, dries, and dissolves into the oblivion of the earth.

(*) Classical origin: The phrase first appeared in the poem Georgics (Book III, line 284) by the Roman poet Virgil, in its full form: “Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus” (“But meanwhile, time flees—irreparably, time flees”).
Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC – 19 BC) was one of the greatest poets of Ancient Rome, a leading figure in Latin literature during the reign of the Emperor Augustus.

[tempus fugit]

diptych, Photography

Tempus Fugit – The Fleeting Nature of Presence
(diptych from the project: Parallel Worlds)

Some presences last only for a single instant. Bodies pass through the light, cast their shadows, and vanish. On the ground, the outlines of an existence in transit linger for a brief moment. Caught between appearance and absence, human figures become traces of a passing. Photography suspends that which the very nature of time condemns to disappearance. Yet, this permanence is merely an illusion: the captured instant no longer exists. Tempus fugit—time slips away, and with it, everything we believe we can hold onto.

[between worlds]

Photography, polytptych

BETWEEN WORLDS

Windows open passages to what the eye can reach, but also to that which remains hidden. Distinct realities intertwine within an uncertain territory, where each seems to hold traces of the other. Light passes through the glass, revealing forms and casting shadows, yet without dispelling every mystery. Amidst presences that persist and figures that dissolve into motion, the world reveals its fleeting nature. What vanishes leaves traces behind; what remains is no longer exactly what it once was. There are presences that survive in this way—on the fringes of the visible—silently traversing time and memory.

Work entered into the open call for the ‘Campos de Luz’ Photography Festival in Campos do Jordão, SP, Brazil (Nov 06–08, 2026), which features the theme ‘Crystal Windows’.

[cartography of the ephemeral]

Photography, polytptych

Cartography of the Ephemeral
“The city is not a place, but a flow”

The city is not presented through its buildings or monuments, but through the successive presences that inhabit and vanish from it; it is constructed by memory (drawing on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities).


The city’s identity is formed by an accumulation of lives, gestures, and anonymous trajectories. Photography becomes a reflection on time and the urban experience.


In a city, traces outlast individuals, turning the urban landscape into a silent archive of memories and passages. What matters is not merely what is visible, but the invisible stories that remain deposited upon these places (drawing on Calvino’s fantastic city of Tamara).

(from my project ‘Parallel Worlds: A Poetics Through Photographic Polyptychs’)

[the persistence of presences]

diptych, Photography

As in Eusapia (one of the most fascinating cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities), the figures inhabit an uncertain boundary between presence and absence. Bodies dissolve into light and shadow, becoming traces of a passage that is already beginning to transform into memory.


The city emerges as a place where the living and the absent share the same invisible space, reminding us that every human landscape is composed as much of those who traverse it as of those who remain within it, silently inscribed in time.

{memory and impermanence}

diptych, landscape photography

{memory and impermanence}

More than merely recording a landscape, this diptych reveals the marks of time inscribed upon the terrain. The dead trees and their reflections transform into traces of environmental and historical processes that go beyond what the image shows at first glance.
Photography thus takes on the nature of a true crystal window: a revealing device capable of making hidden dimensions of the landscape visible and expanding our perception of the world we inhabit.

Photos: ‘Paliteiro’ [Forest of Snags], Tucuruí Hydroelectric Reservoir, Pará, Brazil. February 1988.
Analog photographs on Fuji Superia 100 film.

{traces of the future}

diptych, landscape photography

Traces of the Future
(from the project Parallel Worlds: a poetics through photographic polyptychs)

There are landscapes that seem to exist between two times: that of presence and that of memory. In this pair of diptychs from the Parallel Worlds project, trees, water, fire, and reflections compose a transitional territory, where the landscape reveals subtle signs of a world in transformation.
The images aim not merely to record places, but to capture states of permanence and fragility. These visual records thus become a trace of a time in which past, present, and future coexist. The landscapes function as an archive of signs—indications of the future—transforming into a kind of silent witness to the changes underway on Earth and signaling that the future is not distant, but can already be perceived in the marks inscribed upon the present.
These images engage with the Anthropocene, as they present a nature that can no longer be understood as separate from human action.

[Trajectory and belonging]

diptych, Photography

[Trajectory and belonging]
The stones seem to hold the echo of ancient footsteps. Mother and son, in turn, give substance to what time has not erased. Between them, the diptych bridges memory and presence, suggesting that a place is preserved not only in its physical forms but also in the people who continue to inhabit and reinvent it.

The diptych resonates particularly with certain cities in Italo Calvino’s *Invisible Cities*—places where identity is defined not by architecture but by memory, human relationships, and the persistence of time—especially Zaira, the city that “does not tell its past, but contains it.”

In Zaira, memory is inscribed in the streets, corners, walls, and objects, as well as in the stories and experiences of its inhabitants. The idea that “the path remains in the stones” speaks directly to this notion of a city that accumulates traces of the lives that have passed through it.

Cities are made less of stone than of the relationships, memories, and desires layered upon them (I. Calvino)

‘Droplets’ of thought on photography.

Uncategorized

‘Droplets’ of thought on photography.

I have no formal education in art or photography. That is why I always say I am being a photographer rather than being a photographer [by trade].

Today, I simply wanted to share one of the many things photography has taught me over the long years it has been my companion and healer: all a photographer could ever want is for some of those who appreciate their work—at least a few—to feel the same emotion, with the same intensity (or something akin to it in both respects), that the photographer felt while creating it.

I wouldn’t call this a “generous gift” from photography, though, because my own photography is the result of hard, sweaty labor.
I don’t know about yours.
Everyone knows where the shoe pinches.

Image: an overlay of two of my photographs, edited in Snapseed.