| Publications
> António Júlio Duarte
Portugal, 2006
Within the range of our program to promote contemporary
art from Portugal within the international visual arts arena,
ADIAC will be featuring the work of photographer António
Júlio Duarte in its second volume from a series of books
on rising and mid-career artists from Portugal.
For a significant period of time, photography
was brushed aside and downplayed by traditionalists for being
purely documental. The medium existed on the margins of the visual
arts, but by the end of the twentieth century, a new generation
of professionals had begun to emerge, as well as a new generation
of artists, fresh out of school, that brought photography into
play with their work. Their employment and incorporation of photography
impacted the medium; photography began to be featured in group
shows, on a par with other visual languages. But this rapid shift
from the marginalized locus of documentary to this newfound role
in the visual arts meant that work produced by many straight photographers,
who had chosen to develop their work outside of documentary, was
sidestepped on the whole.
This book is the first to address the true expanse
of António Júlio Duarte’s body of work. It
also reveals how we have attempted to avoid certain trends that
pervade in the arts in Portugal.
The texts in this book, provided by Horacio Fernández,
general curator of PHotoEspaña 2006; Margarida Medeiros,
Assistant Lecturer of History of the Image at Universidade Nova
Lisbon and João Jacinto, contemporary painter and proprietor
of a self-portrait by the artist, bring forward and expand the
issues involved in António Júlio Duarte’s
body of work.
António Júlio Duarte’s imagery
has often been mistaken for travel photography, even though his
work resists this sort of classification. As Horacio Fernández
refers in his text, his images are difficult to convey; they oblige
the observer to take a second look and find something that is
refracted. His photographs refuse the direct history of documental
photography. The neutral way that he captures a scene is arresting,
it allows for individual accounts of the events and plays off
many fictions.
On paging through this book, readers will find
images that unveil a divested mode of capturing the real. This
unwillingness to identify space has served to yield a highly engaging
and poetic body of work.
António Veiga Pinto / Marc Pottier |
BACK
TO TOP