Publications > António Júlio Duarte

Portugal, 2006

[ Texte en français non dispobible ]

Within the range of our program to promote contemporary art from Portugal within the international visual arts arena, ADIAC will be featuring the work of photographer António Júlio Duarte in its second volume from a series of books on rising and mid-career artists from Portugal.

For a significant period of time, photography was brushed aside and downplayed by traditionalists for being purely documental. The medium existed on the margins of the visual arts, but by the end of the twentieth century, a new generation of professionals had begun to emerge, as well as a new generation of artists, fresh out of school, that brought photography into play with their work. Their employment and incorporation of photography impacted the medium; photography began to be featured in group shows, on a par with other visual languages. But this rapid shift from the marginalized locus of documentary to this newfound role in the visual arts meant that work produced by many straight photographers, who had chosen to develop their work outside of documentary, was sidestepped on the whole.

This book is the first to address the true expanse of António Júlio Duarte’s body of work. It also reveals how we have attempted to avoid certain trends that pervade in the arts in Portugal.
The texts in this book, provided by Horacio Fernández, general curator of PHotoEspaña 2006; Margarida Medeiros, Assistant Lecturer of History of the Image at Universidade Nova Lisbon and João Jacinto, contemporary painter and proprietor of a self-portrait by the artist, bring forward and expand the issues involved in António Júlio Duarte’s body of work.

António Júlio Duarte’s imagery has often been mistaken for travel photography, even though his work resists this sort of classification. As Horacio Fernández refers in his text, his images are difficult to convey; they oblige the observer to take a second look and find something that is refracted. His photographs refuse the direct history of documental photography. The neutral way that he captures a scene is arresting, it allows for individual accounts of the events and plays off many fictions.

On paging through this book, readers will find images that unveil a divested mode of capturing the real. This unwillingness to identify space has served to yield a highly engaging and poetic body of work.

António Veiga Pinto / Marc Pottier