There are visual experiences that make us take a wandering path, rambling about the materiality of what we see and feel. It is a thread of memory, very close to what we have accumulated throughout experiences, in which the spirit accompanied our gaze in special moments. We travel repeatedly through this process of perception, latency and remission. In front of the work accomplished, poetic enjoyment envelops us in varying degrees of enchantment and restlessness. In this experience, some images provoke a certain silent apprehension, covered by the aridity of the territory presented. Or is it the provoked affective spaces?
In the essay Homem Pedra by Pedro David, despite the certainty of his landscapes captured in the northeastern backlands, the possible stability of the theme unfolds in an unstable, surreptitiously unpredictable field. The imaginary that a priori leads to the rhetoric between man and nature is confronted, however, with aesthetic choices that reduce the possibility of perceiving the objectivity of the temporal document that surrounds the symbols of the “sertões”.
The visual signs regimented in Homem Pedra reveal themselves as clues, traces, passages and fragments. Understanding the metaphor underlying the non-linear narrative of Pedro David's research is an act that brings with it the intervention of particular worlds that we access in a natural and intuitive way when relating to photographic images. How can we not remember authors like Graciliano Ramos and João Guimarães Rosa who built immutable references in us? How can we not escape the imitation of stereotypes so common in other people about those who live in the backlands? How can we not refer to the Lebanese photographer Benjamin Abrahão Botto (1890-1938) and his portraits of Lampião? How can you not think that the dust, the distance, the scarcity of water, the sun like a dagger, the rigidity of the earth evoke feelings and images? Through visual perception, these or other elements echo.
The work that is established within us indicates the relationship between imaginary territories. When we enter into the poetics presented in this work, the understanding of the backlands experienced by Pedro David – in a distended way, leading time to his time – takes on other contours: those of imagination. For a few moments, we learn to see again, we enter a labyrinth that suggests and recedes through the thin line that intertwines what we see and what is represented.
In this aspect, Pedro David's visual research is permeated with positions of search for language as an expression of thought that precedes the photographic gaze and even photography. The image as a visual code is part of the process of finding an idea, the elaboration of a given theme envisioned in the imagination. Their creative process breathes within a vital and organic network in which artists are firmly linked. Creating is considering filters, mediations, references, needs, desires, dreams, denials, memories, people, times, places, smells, stories and affections. Creating, of course, is more. It is having the uncertainty of a conceptual search that needs to take shape and become an image.
The search and uncertainty, two fundamental axes in the procedural practice of creation, are consistent with something that the author Fayga Ostrower indicates to us as “expansion of imagination”. The photographic practice and involvement, through which Pedro David developed Homem Pedra, makes this discussion possible:
“(...) Creative imagination arises from an individual’s interest, enthusiasm for the greater possibilities of certain materials or realities. It comes from your ability to relate to them. Because, first of all, questions constitute forms of affective relationships, forms of respect for the essentiality of a phenomenon” (Ostrower, 2009).
Homem Pedra brings into his research process a framework of unique perspectives and permanence. When pondering the character of continuity in his work, Pedro David explains, to a certain extent, the content of his artistic search through imagery. “[There is] permanence in each project, as projects are nothing more than attempts to justify with words what cannot actually be verbalized, as it is an internal image”.
The affection of memory
It seems that chance gifted Pedro David. His quest to understand the various facets of the northeastern backlands made him travel. Without many plans or pre-established routes, he discovered “atmospheres” of this territory that only photography could convey the beauty and simplicity found. Traveling could even be an allegory for photography.
We record why we don't go back, we won't be who we were in that place and the place, this, will be what we keep in our memory of what we experienced, of phenomena that sensitized our gaze. Traveling and photographing help to preserve, to comfort, to reassure that we will return to the sensations we experienced.
It would not be too much to consider that by opting for medium format photography, Pedro David takes the path of waiting, of creating stories until the films are developed. The choice to work with stickers in this project goes back to symbolic issues in the creative process.
Knowing the ways in which an essay is constructed becomes another way of understanding the solutions or strategies that the artist achieves through postures that give meaning and visibility to his most intimate and poetic expression.
Thus, talking about the details of capturing the image, developing it and returning the gaze when looking at the cards, during the editing process (continuous creation) and the craftsmanship that this involves, Pedro David writes to me:
“Really, stickers are much more about the process than the result. We know that new digital cameras are capable of producing images as good as films. So why continue to use this expensive and laborious process? It has to do with the handling of equipment, sensitive material, the attitude, care, of separating the moment of production from the moment of editing, and the feeling of dealing with this fixation process of the image in silver gelatin, craftsmanship.
Just like keeping this card with those pieces of film that came from abroad, accompanied the entire trip, stored with complete care, and returned to enter the laboratory and bring these images, just as they were pre-made there, in the backlands. It's a kind of romantic thing, just like collecting pebbles and plant cuttings in each place and bringing them home to revive them here.
It also has a lot to do with reminiscence, as I have clear memories of my parents developing films in the kitchen at night, and the bathroom full of copies stuck to the tiles in the morning...”.
For this reason, we recognize in Homem Pedra a vigorous texture of memory. The philosopher Henri Bergson proposes that all perception is already memory. “We only perceive, practically, the past, the pure present being the inapprehensible advance of the past gnawing at the future”, he explains. Perhaps it is the “stone man”, the hypothesis – as material as it is subjective – that the nature of emotion is equivalent to the territory of the signs we accumulate. Men, stones and memories were and will always be images of all of us. Endless representations.