a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
Before advancing, I feel I must apologize for this confessional note. Really, if you haven’t been a reader of Nihil, do yourself a favor and stop reading; this exposure of the private life of Nihil will make little sense in any case. I’ve been suffering from a strange set of headaches that bring along an…
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What happens inside our homes, in the domestic environment, is something that truly fascinates me, particularly when considering how that intimate environment can be brought into the public sphere, with integrity and respect. In the first months of Nihilsentimentalgia that was pretty obvious. I shared artwork by Esko Manniko, Holly Lynton, Tina Barney, Melissa Ann…
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Dating from mid 90’s, Richard Billingham‘s project Ray’s a Laugh is still a reference to me and I always show it to students whenever we address the art of documenting intimate stories and domestic environments. Ray’s a Laugh is a project about Richard’s father Ray and his mother Liz and their life indoors. If what Billingham…
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As Nihilsentimentalgia’s early readers know well, at the core of this platform is an interest for the idea of phototherapy and, consequently, different approaches to the idea of self. Throughout the years, I’ve done my experiments using photography as a personal therapeutic tool and I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t really work for…
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One of my earliest posts featured a couple of photographs by Malerie Marder and ten years later I am very surprised to go through her work and see that she has been seriously addressing intimacy, not only thematically, as core object of her compositions, but also in what the photographic camera, as a technological medium, does, within…
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Some of my early posts were about the body (its modification, mutilation and sexual dimension). At the time I did a lot of performative photography and self-portrait, so these were pressing issues. It’s difficult to structure the line of thought that arises from revisiting these posts, but three main questions keep lingering in my mind:…
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In June a decade will have passed since I first started Nihilsentimentalgia, so I thought for the next few months I could make an effort to revisit some of my early posts, which were very poorly done. As fate would have it, it’s now confirmed that my obsession with the idea of authenticity is also…
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Bellow Cindy Steiler‘s words: My favorite childhood memories center on spending time with my great-grandmother, Mary Steiler. She taught me to sew, quilt and embroider, all while sharing amazing stories about her life. What she passed to me had been passed to her along a long line of women, inspiring in me a lifelong passion…
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Yesterday, a friend told me that to avoid a cynic approach to life, you just had to choose to live it. I couldn’t agree more. On the other hand, every year, when the world press photo nominees start to invade the visual arena, I get a little consumed with anger and frustration. It’s a waste…
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Thinking about photography inevitably makes us wonder what is consider truthful. Fiction is not only part of art (and truth); it is perhaps the privileged space of art, in which it reveals itself as an autonomous entity, apart from what we commonly understand as “real life.” However, if art creates new possibilities, photography fights a very…
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Some years ago, while attending a PhD class, I was introduced to the artwork of Terike Haapoja and the impact of that encounter led me to a post here. Last year, I ended up having a conversation with that same lecturer, Rogério Taveira, and he told me her recent work was very different, probably closer…
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I’d like to say the separation of the arts according to the specifications of the medium is a thing of the past, but is it? The multidisciplinary artists who graduated from the academy often see their works labeled as “installations” given the amalgam of techniques presented and the rigidity of a certain History of Art,…
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For our second edition, we chose to address the idea of fiction: (fictĭō, fictiōnis) Modeling, shaping, creation; Act or effect of faking, imaginary thing, fantasy; Fable, invention; Dissimulation, pretense, artifice; Falsehood, conjecture, hypothesis. ʘ Send your proposals to propeller@propeller.pt containing: Name (both of author and project) minimum 7 images (with 1500px largest side) Statement (optional)…
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When one is constantly batteling death or other destructive forces, it all seems very transient and it can be very easy to experience happiness, for every sign of life appears extremely beautiful and spectacular. Photographs that try to represent that place of experiencing light (after darkness), are often done in the form of portrait, as…
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In chapter XI (Courtly love as anamorphosis) of Lacan‘s Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), Lacan suggests the term “extimacy” (extimité) to talk about the “intimate exteriority” that is at the core of the Thing. The Thing (das Ding) is a concept that Lacan develops from Freud to identify a primordial element that has been lost and…
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I cannot trace this back to its origins, but I remember reading an interview by someone who started a magazine about artistic content saying you had to be crazy to do so. I now realize you really have to. About a year ago, I joined Hélice to found Propeller and during this year we launched…
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The misguided parallel between spontaneity and authenticity is often mentioned here. We, in general (and students in particular), not knowing how to address the issues of photographic representation, tend to evoke “spontaneity”, “purity”, “genuineness”, “naturalness”, etc. to qualify the truthfulness of the images. These words are part of the lexicon of authenticity, whether or not…
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Nature often makes us question whether we deserve her generosity. She’s so marvelous, so compassionate, so warming… Yes, she can also be deceiving and violent, but that’s what makes her so sublime. The fact that in this country, always socially and politically adrift, we manage to stay calm and collected, must be somehow related to…
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David Nebreda’s work changed my life. It’s no mystery. I remember the first time I encountered his photographs (or they encountered me): it was in a sort of catalog – David Nebreda: Autorretratos (2002) -, that followed one of the author’s rare solo exhibitions, curated by Javier Panera, during the celebrations of the European Capital…
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As is becoming ever more often, another student’s work sets ground @ Nihilsentimentalgia. Carlos was my student for the past year and the selection of work featured here, about his family, caught my attention. These images are part of a larger project about Carlos’ grandmother, Engrácia, with 84 years old, who lives with her husband, Alexandre, 81,…
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When I come across artists that lack ethics or artworks that scream opportunism I get very irritated, sometimes even a bit angry. Often the art world is just so perverse that I wish I didn’t know about that artist or artwork. I usually debate whether or not to write about these extreme situations, not because…
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How does art critic work in other countries? I don’t know. In Portugal, it’s changing. The online magazines and blogs have created platforms where different people write about art and publish critics on exhibitions, publications and short stories on art events overall. So yes, there’s a lot more time spent of the activity of writing…
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I came across this project while reading Pete Brook‘s Prison Photography, one of my favorite blogs out there. Photo Requests from Solitary became part of a larger project, but was initially founded by Tamms Year Ten, a grassroots coalition of artists, advocates, family members and men formerly incarcerated in Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois. Photo requests from Solitary consists…
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The first group of images featured below is part of a project entitled What’s love got to do with it. Here’s Paula Riff‘s statement about that project: I believe in love but it comes and goes. Like the falling of leaves, love often falls gently to the ground; at least that’s my experience. Marbling paper…
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I met Iñigo Sánchez‘s work because he was part of Hélice‘s comprehensive training program 2016/2017. Hélice’s team is the one behind Propeller, the magazine I became involved with, and it was just a matter of days before I ended up meeting the author of some of the photographs that used to be featured in a…
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The biggest problem I see in addressing the question of the objectification of men (or the representation of men as objects of desire) is that we can’t really avoid comparing it to the objectification of women and that is such a heavy burden to carry… Having said this, I’ll try and take the boat through…
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All that is to know about Aleksandra Vajd’s project “Friends of friends are friends” (featured below) can be find in a text by Laura Amann, here. I see, I smell, I feel and hear these photographs reaching me. In Laura Amann’s words: The abstract nature requires us to focus on the process, materiality and technique.…
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What’s wrong with a purple sun? It’s been challenging to write about Belgian photographer Sanne de Wilde‘s The Island of the Colorblind. I mentioned the project here once before, but at the time the book was about to be published (by Hannibal Publishers) and I waited for further information, for there was a lot about the…
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Here is a selection of Akihiko Miyoshi’s profound, complex and beautifully coloured work. Photography’s impulse to depict in its most utilitarian tendencies (for example photo-journalism as art) creates, to use the artist Jeff Wall’s words, the “most problematic kind of photograph” which anchored itself through social validity. This to me is an insufficient condition for…
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