1985

This book is a journey. A journey through space and time. The space is that of Lisbon interiors, its streets, its surroundings, the Portuguese countryside,the beaches overlooking the Atlantic. Light and shadows: in this book there is the profound sense of a place, its unique mixture of obscurity and excitement, opacity and clarity, yet without any extended description of it.

There are no wide views, only glimpses, open doors on landscape fragments (all photographs in this book are vertical).

Time here is what separates the present from the past. Memory and recollections form the repository that feeds each image of this series; vision and re-vision at the same time. It’s not just a matter of nostalgia, but of familiarity: Alfacinha photographs what he knows well and is part of his personal history, never giving up being surprised by the world in front of him. This book is an autobiography. It is an account of the author’s past written through his present. This is an experimental autobiography without a chronology and without a narrative.

There are no events, there is no story to follow, but only a series of elements on which to dwell.

Each photograph is a detail which invites us to dig deep. Each image is a clue leading to no solution.

Scenography without script. Pure atmosphere. Here the gloomy character of a noir stunningly blends with the caresses to the world of a gaze full of empathy. Started under a thick blanket of snow and ice, after a winter remembered as one of the coldest in recent European history, in the end 1985 turned out to be a warm year, full of tragedy and splendor.