alfama 2004

The image above was recently selected to be included in the Black and White exhibition at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO. As part of the submission guidelines, I have been asked to write an artist’s statment. I’ve always been wary of these documents, and found them to be self-serving and little informative. But, submitted for your approval below, is said document. Feedback is appreciated. Here goes:

‘Alfama 2004′ came at the end of nearly two years of exploring my home town with an old TLR and a few boxes of film. I left Portugal as an infant. Having been raised in California, I had long been curious about and inexplicably drawn to Lisbon. Not long after I started to photograph, I started visiting the city regularly. I would spend long days and nights wandering about and photographing what I came across.

The winter of 2004 found me plodding over slick cobble stones in the driving rain, and hiking from miradouro to miradouro on top of Lisbon’s seven hills like a man possessed. This image is of a small football pitch located in the heart of Lisbon’s oldest quarter, Alfama. But what is that vague second exposure shrouding the underlying image? And who are these men playing football? I wonder if these are the same men that I have more recently eaten with in the Indian restaurant in the basement of a nearby shopping mall, or seen playing Peruvian pan flutes on touristed street corners.

I’ve been back to the same neighborhood many times, but I was never again able to find the same football pitch. The shroud of mystery and serendipity that surrounds this image is for me the same mystery and serendipity that surrounds the city and anchors me to it, no matter where in the world I find myself.

28 June 2009. Baoji, China.