WHILE LISTENING DULCE PONTES

Listening Dulce Pontes, 2025 (original photo 2012)

Does our perception of a particular photographic image change over time? When it is clear that the faces and objects captured in it remain unchanged. Are they evolving, or only the observer who chooses to return to them is always someone else–altered, enriched with experience, marked by time and emotion? Is there an equation between our perception of painting, pure photography, and manipulated photography - that visual work which carries the characteristics of conventional photography, yet is stripped of the objectivity of the real through the application of artistic techniques within the creative process? Does it matter whether we look at the image as its original creators or as accidental viewers who once again encounter it?
Such questions often strike me when I dig into my own photo archive, or when I decide that a photograph I once captured holds no value. In those moments, I tell myself: “I’ll let it rest.” And it has happened that a given photograph does not speak to me on the second, third, or even fourth reading. Yet after five or ten years, I may find a way to breathe life into it. Then it feels almost “new” – as if it had travelled back through time to be born again, recreated in the present. On a purely emotional level, this amalgam of perceptions is strangely captivating. Especially when you decide to breathe life into something that once seemed hopelessly drained of creative spark and potential. And even more so when you stumble upon long-forgotten shots, recall the emotion felt at the moment of capture, and experience it anew – this time enriched by the cultural and emotional layers accumulated up to the present moment. Such an experience often reminds me of the state I fall into when leafing through the pages of an old family album, recognising – or searching for – faces directly or indirectly tied to my own path, carefully archived in the trunks and cabinets of the home where I grew up. Sometimes, it is like stepping out at night onto the narrow balcony overlooking Vitosha Mountain, lighting a cigarette, and playing an album by Dulce Pontes. To drift back toward the moment of the photograph – as if carried in the belly of an invisible boat, slowly floating down the back of the Tagus river toward the ocean.
Without an epilogue or clever words for a conclusion, I would simply say: for me, photography changes with time. It ripens, without my forcing it. All it needs is a few seconds to resurface before me – and to make me remember how I perceived it the very first time. There is no formula for that state of perception, but solitude and the right music as a background always help.

September 2025