N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A,
a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
First posts were made exactly ten years ago (and what a strange day I chose to start this – it’s Portugal’s national day…). As I go through those first years, I realize I never once addressed Cindy Sherman’s photographs, which is surprising, for at the time she was an inspiration. The other day, while in…
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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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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 