September

 

437. In the garden.

 

438. Image and writing. Dislocation and memory. These are the reasons of my work, the bases of my research. This research is poetic.

 

439. Memory is abstract and geometric.

 

440. All my exhibitions, my films and my books equate these connections, between the literature of exile and travel photography, personal memory and collective memory, between the memory of the journey and the journey through the memory.

 

441. The recent exhibition in Madrid studied the memory of painting (and necessarily that of the cinema) present in Photography. Perhaps it would be necessary to understand the parallel book first in order to comprehend the exhibition.

 

442. Painting always reached me through cinema.

 

443. Each photograph is a labyrinth. But it is also a story, simultaneously an end and a beginning. To understand this, means to go through this labyrinth and, eventually, to get out of it.

 

444. A video is a photograph with time and movement. Its decoding is similar to that of a photograph. This decoding may be personal and not collective.

 

445. A photograph does not need to be a document, it may be a song. It doesn’t need to be matter; it may aspire to being organic.

 

446. In altering the title of a picture one alters its meaning. The writing bends the image. I like to try this out.

 

447. Once I met a much-traveled man, who kept all the papers that came into his possession. Letters and books, but also bills, vouchers, photographs, cinema and museum tickets, newspaper clips and tax declarations. He archived it all away in file cases and boxes year after year. This was a scrupulous journal of his life, of what he did, of what he spent, what and where he ate, but did not include any personal notes, no record of his thoughts or feelings.

 

448. Just like the space inside an image, memory is a chaos that needs a frame, which happens consciously or unconsciously.

 

449. The geometry of space inside an image.

 

450. An archive is not a collection, because a collector chooses and an archivist has no possible choice.

 

451. It rained nonstop for three days. The landscape changed.

 

452. Memory may be temporal, but it can also be spatial or sensorial. The recalling of a certain place or a certain smell.

 

453. Someone who loses his memory stops being. I remember Buñuel’s description of his mother, who used to read the same magazine over and over without remembering that she had already read it.

 

454. A photograph is a space. A photograph is a memory. A photograph is a text. A photograph is a postcard.

 

455. A collection of photographs is not an archive of pictures. A photograph doesn’t need to be a part of a series, of a collection or of an archive. It may contain the series and the archive within it; that is, it may be self-sufficient.

 

456. A casual photograph is not always the result of chance.

 

457. The technical side of photography still impresses. The camera used, the format of the negative, the number of megabytes, the oversized print or, its counterpoint, the tiny one.

 

458. No one asks the painter the size of his paintbrush, the writer the weight of the document or the filmmaker the name of the film lab.

 

459. Photography, just like boxing, is a daily activity.

 

460. I found, can you imagine a library nearby. A library full of thoughts. It is behind the garden.

 

461. We are all amateur photographers.

 

462. A photograph may be abstract. Even when it is figurative. And, being a piece of paper, it is a page, because, similar to it, it contains the idea of a continuum inside, the notion of time itself passing by.

 

467. Photography seems to me to be closer to writing than to painting or sculpture. Indeed, its very name indicates that relationship. Although some photography seems to me to be closer to some specific painting or to some specific sculpture.

 

468. Earlier photography was closer to alchemy. There were formulas, powders, liquids and darkness. There was solitude in the laboratory and yellowed fingers from the fixer. The paper needed exposure time and the negatives needed development time. The red light illuminated what was still a secret. But, above all, there was experimentation. The photographs did not come out perfect, but they contained the essence of the light baths, of the hands and of the tweezers.

 

469. An artist who, besides his works, provides explanations about them must have little faith in his art. (Klee)

 

470. A photograph (a video) translates an idea, a sensation or only a fascination. It is not explainable, it exists.

 

471. A photograph of a glass of water is not only a photograph of a glass of water, nor even a representation of a glass of water. Just as a word is not only its immediate meaning.

 

472. A silence.

 

473. A moment.

 

474. A secret.

 

475. A death.

 

476. I would like my work to cover everything that I am, everything I have seen, everything I want, everything I remember, everything I know, everything that interests me, everything I have done, everything I haven’t done, everything I wanted to be.

 

477. Today we took a trip to the lake. V also wanted to go, and turned up with a friend J., somewhat irritating, as it happened. But on the other hand he brought his camera and took some nice group photos.

 

478. My work is as serious as a child’s game.

 

479. Here in the house I found two packs of letters from K and A. We used to write long letters, still using typewriters, apparently with no rush, two, three or four pages.

 

480. I remember not leaving the house for days, afraid of missing a phone call I was anxiously waiting for. I don’t remember if I ever received it.

But I can recall the disappointment of not hearing the voice I was waiting for on the phone.

 

481. We don’t wait for phone calls at home anymore.

 

482. Memory is an image.

 

483. As if (Als ob) was the ironic name given by the people of Theresienstadt to the city. As if it were a city, as if there was a normal life there, as if the film was true.

 

484. One should not underestimate accidents and chance in artistic work.

 

485. A telephone book is a perfect model for an archive (until mobile phones came along).

 

486. I think that photography, just like cinema, is magic (a spell), that has in the meantime lost some of its powers.

 

487. Collecting, archiving, recording, cataloguing.

 

488. S telephoned in the middle of the night asking for names of luxury hotels.

 

489. As a child I collected stamps, coins, picture cards, postcards, bottle-tops, tourist brochures and political propaganda.

 

490. When people travel they tend to take photographs, to film and to write. These are necessary records, which prove and intensify the experience of moving, of traveling or of exile. It is the alterations in the daily life that provoke these creative acts. The other arts seem to be more sedentary; they need a physical space for their practice.

 

491. For me, the most symbolic image in the series Terezín is still the one of the people around a table: a false family at a false meal in a false dining-room in a false house in a false city in a false country in a false documentary made by a false film crew.

 

492. On the 8th of June 1980, H. had lunch in company at the Apolo in Funchal, a second-class restaurant. It was hot that day, so he had an ice-cream at the end of the meal. He paid four hundred and three escudos, for which he was given the bill with the number 4754. It was neither the first time nor the last that he had eaten there, as can be proven by the bills with the numbers 4184, 4812, 4834, 5088, 5172 and 5244 in my possession.

 

493. Art critics and the public in general find it difficult to understand photography exhibitions which theme is not easily reducible to a single sentence: this exhibition is about this area, is about self-representation, is about this group of people, is about this industry. Photography thus becomes important due to its agenda and not due to what it may represent or inspire.

 

494. Hiatus: a pause or an interval in a sequence, in a series or in a process.

 

495. Yesterday we received a visitor. R came from town and, in his honor, we went down to the sea for a few hours. On the way back we stopped at a mysterious, somewhat hidden place, in the middle of the rocks, with a view of the inlet. The clouds came down to sea level, creating a uniform carpet that changed colors with the evening falling.

 

496. The size of a photograph (or of a video projection) also depends on the distance one intends to place the viewer.

 

497. A reproduction of a photograph in a magazine or book is always a reproduction. In shouldn’t be confused with the original. That only exists in the original print with the format and the finishing chosen by its author.

 

498.  A well designed photography book may create a new type of original.

 

499. The photograph (memory, writing) is a dislocation.

 

500. In the photograph, we are happy.