Lisbon, you know ...
[TIL #37] Can you tell why you live where you live?
Welcome to a new edition of the Tales of Ink and Light. In this one, i flip through the pages of a classic photobook and find echoes of the poetry that attracted me to Lisbon.
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A decisive factor in my decision to move to Lisboa was the poetic atmosphere that i had felt while walking up and down its streets during a few short-ish stays. Often when i leave the house, i am unexpectedly reminded of that impalpable yet intensely real thing that exudes from the city.
I find it hard to define (and there is also the fact that i’d be reluctant to name it with precision, even if it were possible). It may be the colours of the walls, it may be the light, it may be a smell, it may be certain clothes people wear, it may be the sounds, it may be attitudes or certain sentences, and the river is certainly a part of it. It is these small things that suddenly appear to incarnate the soul of the place and make you think — oh, yes, indeed, i’m here, this is it. It is the sort of inescapable feeling that seems impossible to describe and that you can only understand if you’ve experienced it personally time and time again.
‘Lisbon, you know…’ is a sentence i read in a poem that appears in Lisboa, cidade triste e alegre (‘Lisbon, sad and joyful city’), a photobook that started as a series of booklets sent to subscribers by post (at the time, it was a way to circumvent the censorship of the dictatorial regime) and later rose to fame after being prominently featured in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s History of the Photobook. A modern facsimile edition was published in 2018, years after the death of the authors.
Nowadays, this book is celebrated as a remarkable achievement in many ways (there’s an excellent documentary on RTP if you understand Portuguese).
It results from a collaboration between two friends, both architects and amateur photographers, who decided in 1953 to make pictures of their town together. Victor Palla and Costa Marins found inspiration in Italian cinema and their work has been described as the great neo-realist film that was never made about Lisbon.
One of them used a Leica, the other a Rolleicord, but none of their images are individually signed. Similarly, their commentary of their photographs, a combination of technical details, brief accounts of the circumstances in which the images were made and musings on the art of photography, is written in a collective voice.
The two authors did everything themselves. Quite originally for the time, the design includes the insertion of pages of different widths as well as foldout pages.
It could be interesting to compare the pictures of Victor Palla and Costa Martins with the photographs made at the same period by another Portuguese photographer, Artur Pastor (i wrote about a collection of his images in a previous post). Where Pastor’s photography tends to show an idealised view on the country’s working classes, the photos in Lisboa, cidade triste e alegre are interested in life as it was lived, in small daily moments as they happened.
The authors conceived their shared work as a ‘graphic poem’. The photographs are accompanied by poems by various authors, either pre-existing or written for the occasion. To me, it is a great example of how words and pictures can work together to tell a story. And although the book dates back to a time long gone and represents a past i never knew, i find in its pages something of that inescapable and impalpable nature of the city where i live.
I am curious: is there a poem or a photobook (or a book, or a movie…) that somehow captures the essence of the place where you live? And was it part of your reasons for living there?
Lisbon, you know …
Alguém diz com lentidão:
«Lisboa, sabes...»
Eu sei. É uma rapariga descalça e leve.
um vento súbito e claro nos cabelos,
algumas rugas finas a espreitar-lhe os olhos,
a solidão aberta nos lábios e nos dedos,
descendo degraus e degraus
e degraus até ao rio.
Eu sei. E tu, sabias?
(Eugénio de Andrade)
Somebody says slowly:
'Lisbon, you know...'
I know. It is a girl, barefoot and light,
a sudden, light breeze in her hair,
a few fine wrinkles peeking out of her eyes,
the open solitude on her lips and fingers,
going down steps and steps
and steps to the the river.
I know. And you, did you know? 
A few suggestions
Listening to the radio used to be one of my favourite ways to hear about the world and discover new things. I liked that that you could listen while doing something else: as it relied only on one sense, it did not require you to stay still, and left you with a wide margin of freedom in many ways. I admired how voices and soundscapes could convey such a lively impression of things. I now listen to podcasts with a similar pleasure. Here’s three things that i enjoyed recently.
This conversation with Arturo Soto on the Frames podcast had been recommended to me by @victory_sauce, who rightly thought that i’d be interested in how Soto’s work combines words and pictures.
Sometimes the timing is perfect: i listened to an interview with David Campany (in which he describes his professional itinerary for Les Voix de la photo) the day after viewing the William Klein exhibition that he curated for the MAAT in Lisbon: The whole world is a stage.
In this conversation on the Photoethics podcast, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, a photojournalist and a poet who is engaged in long-term coverage of the situation in eastern Ukraine, insists on the importance of making time to work slowly when reporting on situations of conflict. I had been touched by how her collection of poems, One Language, speaks of violence in war and personal history.
the drama on the stage within
My little book the drama on the stage within is available on amaz0n and in a higher-end quality on Blurb. You can find out more about the project here. If you get a copy (an excellent way to support my work), please leave a review: it is really helpful.
Thank you for taking part in the Tales of Ink and Light, it’s good to have you on board.
Pierre François
How was the book originally published? Is it currently in a reprint form?
Hello Pierre. I am happy to discover something that represent the real Lisbon, as Lisbon is often portrayed as an idyllic paradise, a place filled only with light, while ignoring the darkness that inevitably comes with its history and heritage of poverty and dictatorship.