Description
Cidade Sombra, a photo book about Lisbon
‘The image we construct of a city is usually made up of a series of relatively pleasant and innocuous clichés: monuments, views, green spaces, landscapes populated or marked by architecture and advertisements that have become absorbed into the urban fabric. In one way or another, these elements are all present in the photography of Fernando Martins, but less as motif and more as something pre-existing, to which the apparent disorder of urban life adds meaning, but also raises questions. The image of the city is, therefore, subverted and our immediate impressions are challenged by certain “additions” that originate not in some deliberate urban planning scheme, but in the dynamics of everyday life.
Martins entitles his book Cidade-sombra (Shadow-city) and this is particularly appropriate for his aim is to capture and frame what escapes our immediate perception in order to build another vision of the city, in this case a city where daylight refects off the Tagus River and comes back at us enhanced. Martins' vision is essentially a nocturnal one, not because he has an especially saturnine temperament, but because the night, its shadows, its unsettling chiaroscuro, better allows for a consideration of what the day, with its nonchalant clarity, hides from view.’
From the foreword by António Mega Ferreira
