Susan Sontag, a leading American writer and art critic from the second half of the 20th century, argues in her essay On Photography (1977) that photography is generally regarded as realistic: «Photography is the paradigm of an inherently equivocal connection between self and world . . . sometimes dictating an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates the self. One side or the other of the connection is always being rediscovered and championed».[1] Photography has been commonly described in dichotomous terms, either as a conscious or intuitive activity, as an individual act of expression about the world, or a distanced relationship with the surroundings, generating images that are more personal and subjective, or strict and informative, although the act of photographing is still a construction of reality, a fiction, a steady flow of reality captured by photographers.

Febre by António Júlio Duarte, on display in the Contemporary Gallery of Museu de Arte de Serralves and Capela da Casa, conceived by the photographer and curator Paula Fernandes, brings together works made between 2019 and 2022 (during the COVID-19 pandemic), characterised by the particular layout of fifty photographs in the exhibition room, of similar formats, in a straight line, under a yellow light which can sometimes daze us, underlining the feverish state mentioned in the title, forming a set of both black and white and coloured images, revealing fragments of everyday life, objects that crowd a house, still lifes, textures, portraits and bodies hidden and revealed. Apparently banal photographs, but with great tension, contrast and plasticity, reverberating the photographer’s “self” before reality, offering an infinite number of reading avenues, in a relationship with reality that, according to Sontag, is always being rediscovered and championed. And yet, Queimado (2017), a large-format print on fabric in Serralves’ Casa da Capela, a self-portrait of António Júlio with his body scorched on a destroyed set, taken during the shooting of Sandro Aguilar’s film Mariphasa (2017), rounds off the exhibition, confronting the notions of the photographer who negates his physical presence in the photographs and the one who stands at the centre of the image in a fictional context, prompting further questions about the ideas of photography’s relationship with reality, the photographer’s contact with the world and the photographer’s quest to find themselves in the world, or the submission to reality or chasing reality itself.

António Júlio Duarte (Lisbon, 1965) embarked on his artistic career in a more sustained and intense way from the 1990s onwards, after he left Portugal for other countries, producing images in series such as Oriente/Ocidente (1990-1994), Japan Drug (1997) or White Noise (2011). First in black and white and later in colour, his photography gradually revealed itself as a means of uncovering the world, but also as a statement of the “self” towards the perceived reality, even in an autobiographical way that is not specifically declared. The author told RTP 2’s Entre Imagens TV show (2014): «it’s a body of work in which there is a degree of evolution as I continue to make images, where what I shoot is always external to me, but also a reflection of what I feel in relation to the state of the world» [2]. In Febre, the photographer’s first solo exhibition at Serralves, he is showing images from his home and its surroundings, in a seemingly different exercise from the norm, but which is nonetheless his position before reality. Using an Olympus Mju II Point & Shoot, a camera conventionally used for family scenes due to its convenience, portability and quality, António Júlio points and shoots without using the viewfinder to frame, processing the images at home using traditional techniques, obtaining greater proximity and intimacy in capturing the world he inhabits, but also greater spontaneity. These images in the exhibition room provide us with a narrative of this feverish and anxious state of now, of this isolation and lockdown, of these tiny moments that have become big, of these silences and noises, of this stillness and slowness of time.

To end with a quote from the author: «Even when working with reality, photography is never realistic. That claim that it registers reality impartially is nothing more than fiction, one of photography’s great lies. Photography is only ever an image constructed by its maker. As soon as a photographer isolates a moment in time, they are building fiction. »

Febre by António Júlio Duarte is on show at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves until November 12, 2023.

[1] Sontag, S. (2012). Os Evangelhos Fotográficos. Em S. Sontag, Ensaios sobre fotografia (pp. 115-148). Lisbon: Quetzal Editores. p.123.

[2] Entre Imagens – António Júlio Duarte (1/13). (March 3, 2014). From Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoVAm6gNoDs

[3] Ibid.