Leica Gallery Porto

LOBA 2020: Gonçalo Fonseca – “New Lisbon”

The subject chosen for this project is a traditional festival that comes from a legend where man and animal messure their strength. It is called „A Rapa das Bestas“ and is developed in the municipality of A Estrada, specifically in the village of Sabucedo.

Gilles Caron, who at the beginning saw the war correspondent as a hero, began to question the meaning and value of his profession very early on. He was one of the first photojournalists to show signs of a great inner conflict and a kind of moral crisis: would it be enough just to be a witness or a mere spectator? Could he do more than take pictures? His answers led him to move his camera away from cliché images and to pause, for as long as it took, in the lives and feelings of all those touched by the war.

Stricken by the adverse conditions of extreme hunger that, in the 40’s of the XX century, unmercifully ravage the Cape Verde, the portuguese colonists found in the recruitment of Cape-Verdean servants an inexhaustible source of resources capable of enduring such arduous labor. For the unfortunate Cape-Verdeans, the recruitment represented a hope and the only opportunity of escaping the hunger and death reign their homeland. Even though conscious of the likelihood of being taken advantage of, in their misfortune, the Cape-Verdeans embraced the recruitment offered to them, in a mix of dissimilar feelings, miscellaneous motivations and dreams of prosperity in the fertile lands of S. Tomé & Principe.

To revisit the work of Gérard Castello-Lopes is to not only look back at Portugal and the world during the 50s and 60s, but it is also to look with a critical distance to the pictures he produced from the 90s onward.
With his work everything seems to have been prepared to be photographed. Castello-Lopes carefully examines the reality, always attentive to all signs and sees the world not as it is but as he wants to see it, as if a mysterious order were awaiting for his gaze to be recognized and revealed.

Leica Gallery Porto organizes for the first time in Portugal an exhibition of the spanish photographer Daniel Casares Román. Human Colour shows the last years of his work and serves as a liaison between various projects, but with something in common: the human being