Tag: color photography

Descalvado, SP Brasil. 2020.

Nothing stands the test of time.
The walls and roof of a house that once served as shelter and home to a family who lived there have nothing left to protect.
All that remains is emptiness; loneliness; isolation; abandonment.
It is lost in space and time.
Seeing it, I wondered: who were its inhabitants? What became of them? Where are the people who gave it life today?
Where and at what ages are the children who this house likely saw born and raised? Many dreams were dreamed there. Many plans for the future were made there.
I don’t have answers to these questions, but that doesn’t stop me from speculating about all that may have happened in the past, within these four walls and under this roof.
Today, it represents only a shadow in the anthropized landscape of a sugarcane field, so typical of the interior of the state of São Paulo, where I was born, raised, and where I live. When I was a boy, I believe the word and meaning of agribusiness had not been created in this country—agribusinesses that could and should be far more sustainable than they are.
This house, today, embodies the practical meaning of the transitory nature of our lives, of our world(s), and of how things inevitably change over time. Today, it is an element of the landscape that is nothing more than a testament to the concept of resilience in its figurative and most painful sense: its ability to recover or adapt to misfortune or change.
It is today a testament to the passage of time, to the entropy of oxidation and deterioration of the materials it was once built upon. They insist on remaining standing. They stand there, motionless, before me.
The images of these houses captured through the lenses of my cameras show not only the very object that the houses still are, but also the time of life and the time lived, and the memories of the people who once lived in them. They show the sum of time.