Words and photography are mutually interchangeable terms. They are used to build world images – in fact, photographs and words are used to build worlds. Photography and words are more than just testimonies: they are constitutive elements. Luís Palma’s (b. 1960) worldview is expressed in the equivalence between photographic image and verbal image – for instance, not in the connections between titles and photographic pieces, but in the way the exhibition is structured, as if it were a book of ‘selected poems’. Frequently, in such selections, the titles of the set coincide with the title of one of the poems included in it. This is not any different: Vinte e cinco palavras ou menos names one of the exhibition pieces, which also includes four other works. The implication is that the ‘poem’ Vinte e cinco palavras ou menos (the photograph titled as such) is to be read as a unit, identical in its autonomy to each of the other four elements on display. One of these other elements, which the author called Projecto Escuro, comprises exactly 25 black and white photographs, some of them high up, others wide down, but all with similar proportions, arranged along the internal side wall of the chapel of the former women’s convent that has housed Museu Municipal de Faro for over fifty years. The step is like that of a chiasm, a cross: the title of one photograph is taken as the description of the 25 others; and the title that indicates these 25 is projected onto the first one (or any of the others, for that matter).

The altar, at the top of the convent’s ancient chapel, features the (colour) photograph with the title Vinte e cinco palavras ou menos: in the foreground, the plate of a drum set, primed with adhesive canvas and, behind it, on a wooden hanger, a black leather jacket over a denim jacket. The hidden compartment and the collection of elements inside suggest that this is a small studio, or a musician’s caravan: the evidence comes from Luís Palma’s note on the exhibition: ‘The title of this project was inspired by Iggy Pop’s concept for the creation of The Stooges’ lyrics’ (not to use more than 25 words in each of the songs he wrote, contrary to Bob Dylan) and it came to the author “during the making of a photo set […] taken inside a trailer that served as a musician’s home”. In the small brochure that comes with the exhibition, as well as in the album published on the day of the public opening in Faro, the photograph is dated 2017 – but the room description lists it as 2021, which harks back to its initial presentation in the group show We Want Electricity (Galeria Pedro Oliveira, curated by Susana Moreira Marques).

For this solo show in Faro, held by Associação ArtAdentro, Palma offers a dialogue between that towering image, of the small space of creation and rebellion, with three other pieces – Paula (1993), Cabeça de boi dissecado (1993) and Lada (presented without a date on the room text, but identified in the album as from 2010), to which is finally added the set of 25 black and white photographs (or verses from a poem).

Paula is the exhibition’s starting point, positioned as a single figure on the back wall of the revamped chapel room; Cabeça de boi dissecado, displayed in the same room, but opposite the exhibition’s entrance door (in other words, becoming the first image the visitor sees as soon as they enter) is part of the Projecto Escuro as it is described in the exhibition catalogue: revisiting the exhibition as a set of poetic works means that they are conceived as choruses, or independent verses; they force the whole to be reexamined along certain axes: the depiction of a naked body, assertive and whole in its evidence of life, on the one hand; and, on the other, a head without hair or skin, in which the ox’s eye – a sacrificial animal? – becomes the visitor’s or photographer’s scopophilic instrument, conditioning the interaction with all the other exhibited images.

Some of the possible ties between Luís Palma’s work and the history of photographic art can be found in the Projecto Escuro section: the chiaroscuro contrast aesthetic of Vinte e cinco palavras is overlaid by the world that Larry Clark (photographed in 1988 by Palma in Lisbon, the 25th image in the set, serving as the concluding verse) devised in the early 1970s for an idea of America. Palma’s range in the collection, which dates from half a century after the one Clark established in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is more far-reaching: it stretches from Lisbon to Madrid, Porto, New York and London, but features global cultural figures such as Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, or human and urban landscapes that can be identified with any city anywhere in the world today.

The exhibition reveals Luís Palma’s work over almost half a century of photographic creation. It lets you understand the way he approaches people and places (his work on urban landscapes or human involvement in peripheral parts of cities is well known), the way he pins down pop culture icons and reflects on them (for example, the Mick Jones diptych, in which the musician is portrayed taking photos and consequently embodies Luís Palma himself[1]). It is a look inside oneself which accepts the presence of so many others.

Vinte e cinco palavras ou menos by Luís Palma is at Museu Municipal de Faro until September 15, 2024.

NOTE: Museu Municipal de Faro has now reopened to the public after three months of redevelopment work. The team behind the project included architectural studies by Teresa Valente, Patrícia Malobbia and João Mateus. Besides the aforementioned (re)opening of the room that now extends the chapel area, the most visible changes are the significant accessibility improvements (the first floor of the old convent used to be accessible only by stairs) and the replacement of the flooring, for which mainly local materials were employed -, Bordeira stone on the ground level and Santa Catarina terracotta tiles on the upper one. The initiative and the progress of an endeavour more than a decade in the making are to be commended.

[1] Interestingly, both photographs are displayed in inverted positions in the exhibition and in the catalogue: on the latter, the left-hand page features the musician perched on a backrest with his legs pointing to the left, while the right-hand page shows him with his legs pointing to the right: statuettes unfolding a plane. On the wall of Museu Municipal de Faro, the photograph on the right of the catalogue appears on the left, and the other way around: the effect achieved by the exhibition is an intimate invitation, an inwardness that is played out between the embrace of legs turned inwards (and not beyond the limits of catalogue pages), further underlined by the fact that, in the alignment of the seven (of the 25) exhibited outside, only the frames of these two photos touch each other.