At the request of the publisher "The Rule of the Game", in the early 70's, I graphically organized a collection of poetry books. After the cover, simple and austere, glued in two corners (so it could be torn off), a reproduction of a photograph from that prodigious machine. The small print-runs allowed this luxury and, as poems were concerned seas and trees in soft "pastel" colors were the symbolic system found.
When Fernando Gonçalves invited me to this series of twenty-four photographs that I now present to you, I didn't have the slightest idea of what was going to happen.
After the beautiful invention of "Selfies?" from Pedro (Cabrita Reis) and the delicate work of Luisa's (Costa Gomes), I was the "third" of this strange adventure.
It looks easy and fascinating, but the Polaroid is dangerous and treacherous. The sun light burns to the unbearable white, the lack of light immediately brings the the terrible black. Studio composition? There is no time. Balance? How if I am unbalanced. And the hand trembles, the display does not coincide with the lens, nor the light, nor is the image that I peek, my act of choice, never appeared when the image is forming and finally fixed. I confess that the first six or seven photographs were thrown in the trash. From then on I began to accept and even enjoy the huge surprises. I dared to compose, to correct with acrylic paint (how difficult it is to work with this material that is not soft and mixes badly!) organizing the obtained images within a radius of less than five hundred meters from my house, by colors and themes, metonymy and not metaphors, as in the cinema I like.
And the second confession, perhaps the most important, was the appearance as a magnificent gift, of two ghosts: one from a trunk lying in the in the botanical garden, other, from a painting on the wall of a church, whose entire responsibility is of this extraordinary machine of the fixed instants, and not mine, I assure you.
João Botelho, in the beginning of May 2023, in Lisbon
