a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
Photography is not about reality. The fact that, when using a camera, what we see on film or screen somehow resembles circumstances we may have witnessed, has been complicating the relationship between photography and reality for almost 200 years. Mimese can explain part of the confusion, but not all. When illustrating a scene with photo-realism…
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I started writing this post a week before students did their final presentations. We had our final class of tutorials and I found myself going back to a place of real discomfort, once again questioning what the hell was I doing (being a teacher) and if it was worth pursuing. A week or two prior…
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I’ve got a ton of shit to do and a multitude of voices controlling my every thought, writing stories that will one day be told, but not now. The only match I can seam to operate today, between what’s going on between the public and the private sphere, is to write, once again, about war…
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Everyday, I wake up, hear the news, see some photographic registers of the previous events in Ukraine, get nauseated, shed a few tears and then re-fuel the level of frustration. It’s masochism, but I can’t avoid it. My irritation regarding what photography has been doing in relation to this particular war has been escalating to…
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While WWIII isn’t officially declared, we just go about our days, or we don’t. I’m writing in anger and frustration, sick to the guts, thinking the best way to deal with this is to write and, in doing so, prevent students from having to hear me talk about this non stop for the rest of…
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The other day I discovered a very curious fact about this blog. WordPress sent a notification about an out-of-the-ordinary affluence to the site, and as I ventured into the statistics to see what people were downloading, there came the surprise: since 2020, The Unabomber Manifesto has been downloaded more than 10.000 times! Nothing remotely compares…
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Speaking from Portugal, a poor country that happens to have a magnificente geographical location, this may sound dramatic and nonsense. After all, we’re all safe here. We have some wheat, potatoes, cows, sheep, milk and sunshine, ocean surfers and couch surfers, though definitely less crowd surfing than needed. Basically, nothing with global significance is happening…
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Last week José, an enthusiastic student, brought several photobooks to class. As he put the first one in front of me, I was immediately stroke by its grotesqueness. I was unfamiliar with the author’s work and asked to borrow it. Back at home with the book and struggling to find words to make sense of…
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Just dropping a few personal notes on CELEUMA, a residency program we’ve just created. Details can be found at our website (in portuguese only, for this first open call). So CELEUMA is set i n a family home, a place with loads of emotional baggage, which needed to be digested and regurgitated before a plan…
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Let me start by saying that all I really want to put out there with this post is that I came to a conclusion that probably most have arrived by now, meaning that, in the experience of love – and while caring for those we love – all that is guaranteed is that we’ll fail.…
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Events contaminated by censorship related questions keep pilling up. They’re spreading at such a vertiginous rate that it’s difficult to keep up with the debate. I’m not sure where this text is going, but I see it as an attempt to make sense of several things happening in the past few months. When confinement measures…
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I started to work on this image about four months ago. It’s been a long and extremely slow process. I was sure about the scale I would be working on (7 meters long by 1,5 meters high – 300gr watercolor roll paper) and the species I wanted to represent – o Canavial; the cane field…
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caption (image above): some of the posters created for LESMA. Whatever the projects we get ourselves into, there’s always a decent amount of negligence involved, isn’t there? That’s how I feel when I think of this recent project I got myself into – LESMA (slug). Obviously, instead of “negligence”, I could have chosen a more…
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It’s been seven days as I write this. Luva, one of the family dogs, left this world. The circumstances are still hard to process and detailing them is still not an option. I think part of the trauma that settled in was potentiated by having to deal with the possibility of loosing all my canine…
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Just another end-of-the-academic-year post. Another academic semestre that made us all stretch our creative brains to make the best out of another confinement situation. Although my relationship with online classes is still one of rejection, I did learn something from what happened last year and was more resourceful this time around (or so I think).…
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caption (image above): © Riccardo Angei, from Glue and Souls. I’d like to state, with a certain amount of certainty, that the only thing that sets men and women apart is that we’ll never be able to explain to men what it feels like to be a woman in a men’s world. They know, they empathize,…
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It’s been a relatively organic process the way this blog has step into a coma. It’s not dead, nor am I thinking about killing it, since Nihilsentimentalgia works as a memory replacement: if I can’t remember the name of this or that author, I can always find her/him here, for I never forget the images…
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It’s obviously a discussion on the agenda and Portugal isn’t an exception. Some recent events moved me to write this post. So, first, a personal note about the image presented above: I’ve been preparing a workshop that addresses the political clima. You can say it’s an artivism workshop, but I prefer to see it as…
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About a year and a half ago, I was invited by Recyclart – thru Vincen Beekman – to write about one of their community projects. It was a bit of an ethical dilemma, but I accepted, though I kept thinking Why am I looking at these images? The paragraph bellow, from the text published –…
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caption (image above): A photograph from Alphonse Bertillon’s photo album from his exhibition at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Mental Illness and depression, in particular, have been the talk of the month, given that the confinement has sparked new conversations about social interaction, human kindness and wellbeing and, of course, the lack of…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 