a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
subtitle featured image: poster for Head On Photo Festival open call For a variety of reasons I’ll quickly enunciate, this is a hard text to write. I’ve been criticizing art competitions for some time now, but last year some particular situations made me get back to the subject, so here I am. Don’t bother reading…
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There used to be three eagles flying over where I live. In the last couple of days, a fourth has join in. They’ve been particularly vocal and agitated. It seems like they’re having fun, almost like celebrating something. As I sit outside the house with my family of cats and dogs, I observe them and…
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Visibility and recognition have been a recurrent theme at the heart of the work I’ve been doing with the group of image-makers who are attending my course on Self-portraiture as a therapeutic tool. Because of that, some parallel discussions have come up and I’ve also been trying to understand why exactly am I one of…
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This was supposed to be a post about a Creative Residencies program happening in Chamusca, in Portugal, this Summer, but as I sat down to think about what I wanted to say, it became clear that I was going to have to talk about the state of the arts in Portugal and my complicated relationship…
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I’ve started a cicle of therapeutic photography in January, while going thru a ruff patch, and as that process is now coming to an end, I finally decided to share something about what I’ve been doing. Back in January I felt depressed and was afraid I might be falling into another rabbit hole. Some prior…
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When I decided to open the house I now live in to artists, so they could come and stay for some days, alone, enjoy and dive into creative processes as they willed, I wrote about it here. It’s been two years. The residency program went on for two periods – Spring and Autumn of 2022…
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Photo above, as shared by Khaled Beydoun and Wissam Nassar: sourced from israeli media which published a picture of displaced civilians who were arrested from shelter schools in northern Gaza, abused and stripped of their clothes. I’ve not stopped writing posts here at Nihil, I’ve just been unable to finish and/or publish them. Social reality…
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About 9 months ago, a colleague invited me to collaborate on an academic project that asked us to produce both a written essay and a video. I accepted thinking it would be a good incentive to finish a text I’d been writing about Nagika (one of the dogs that lives with me), particularly about her…
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This is a post about a photobook, namely A Zona, by Diogo Simões, published by Pierre von Kleist in 2022, in the context of a national competition promoted by Arte deste Século Association Book Prize (1st edition). But before going into it, I’d like to make a couple of statements: First and foremost, although I recognize…
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I learned to love teaching. It didn’t come naturally. The first couple of years were really hard, but it got better. I studied different pedagogical approaches, learned from students and colleagues and discovered ways to adapt without having to sell my soul. As in other areas in my life, sometimes I overworked, others I self-sabotage…
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I only care about the truth. This statement, though not false, might well not be entirely true. Fact is: I’ve been obsessed with truth since a very young age. It first manifested in an existentialist type of quest and then evolved into other things – radical politics, artistic expression, spirituality, etc. – contaminating every aspect…
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About two years ago António Júlio Duarte approached me in order to consider writing an essay about his artwork. The invitation itself and the challenge were tempting, but I hesitated a lot, thought it was more than I could handle. Obviously now I’m writing this because, at some point, I decided to embark on the…
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I’m approaching the end of a long process of leaving the house I’ve been inhabiting for the past 6 years and start a different life, somewhere else. The images in this post illustrate just that. Also, for the first time in many years, I’ve asked for help with taking care of my family (dogs and…
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Something weird is happening in the way I relate to images and, therefore, talk and write about them. In part, this is the result of a complex internal process, somehow related to exercises aimed at letting the mind wander in different directions. On the other hand, I’m aware this is also the result of the…
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Why studying porn is like taking a cold shower, by Eva Wiseman: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/may/07/studying-porn-is-like-taking-a-cold-shower-eva-wiseman?CMP=fb_gu The Battle Over What It Means to Be Female, by Chris Hedges: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-battle-over-what-it-means-to-be-female/ The Feminist Avant-Garde, Now More than Ever, by Thomas Micchelli: Mi sexualidad es una creación artística (Lucía Egaña Rojas) The Sex Industry’s Attack on Feminists, by Meghan Murphy: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-sex-industrys-attack-on-feminists/…
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I had my first proper vacation time in six years and for about one month I moved to CELEUMA, a house inherited from a dear friend that passed away in 2018, which I’ve recently turned into a creative residency. The house is located in the countryside, isolated but not without some neighbours and the sea…
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I’ve been writing this post for weeks. Adding, editing, proofreading and questioning the intention to publish it. Obviously, I write because I want to, but mostly because I feel the urge to express myself and words are always my place of solace. In my mouth, words taste raw; often too dramatic and erratically poetic. As…
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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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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 