self-less self-portraits
self-less self-portraits could be a voyeuristic and vain obsession to recognize in the traits
of some animals, which symbolically emerge in the great literary history, bible included, intensive
human details. It will probably be all that, nevertheless, it is, above all, an existential and specular photographic essay and, therefore, quasi-biographical.
Or as Simão do Vale Africano confesses to us: «brief reflection on how space can
be occupied by something completely ours (in its symbolic and seductively twisted existence)
and, at the same time, be deprived of any human trait that might remind us of the idea of a portrait’.
self-less self-portraits
self-less self-portraits invites us to take an other look at one of the most traditional genres of photography – the portrait – which, here, becomes the medium par excellence for transmuting the most essential affective traits of the human.
Thus, «with that distance that perception likes to
be called imagination, the realistic features of animals are a personal and intransmissible symbol of something in us that can go wrong».
Going wrong or, so to speak, diving into the sordid depths of (self) fiction.
