Duarte Belo
Duarte Belo is beginning to understand. It has been four ddecadesyears that he has been walking, camera in hand, through a country that has revealed itself to be endless, labyrinthine, diverse —vast, after all. He began in 1982, at the age of 14 , in Vila do Conde. He was onChristmasfor Christmas. He used his mother’s camera, a Voigtländer Vito, to photograph Senhora da Guia Beach, and he hasn’t stopped since. At first, she used one roll a year, more or less. Then he taking more and more photos, until he wasthousands of photos a day. In 2022, he took more than 220,000.
“I photographed every city on the continent—146in in all. In each city, I take 500 or 600 photographs, sometimes more. What I do is a visual archive. I walk, I stop, I take pictures.”
What makes you stop? “I don’t know if I’m looking for beauty. I don’t think so. Often it’s just photographing what imposes itself. II made a guide to places not to visit back in the early 2000s. I went back there later, and nothing seemed ugly to me anymore. The question of beauty no longer interests me. There are very ingenious solutions in places ‘’,” he concludes.
There are thousands of kilometersofin his legs, there are road tripssothat he’s lost count (but hasn’t lost the receipts for). He turned the Renault 4L— the first car with which, in the 1980s, he began to travel throughPortugal from north to ssouth – a benchmark, a mema, a choice. The sources of mywork are not just books – they are a loaf of bread, a thousand-year-old olive tree, a stone, the water of the river. Everything is a reference.
The perspective is always, or almost always, to try to understand, to read the spaces, the sites, the places, throughisthephotography. It does not erase images: “Ionly when, at the moment I take the photograph, IIa false shot, an overlap.” After that, he saves everything.
“I seek ways to capture space and convey this experience ofanalysis and interpretationinto a visual experience,” she explains, with the same clarity and precision with which she organizes the archive, the mind, theitslife itself. “I’ve always felt the need to organize. Perhaps it comes from my trainingin Aarchitectureand my time at an engineering firm, where I learned very rigorous documentation methods,” she says.
Each job has a numbernumber, ispart of a chronology and linked to a set of images. Everything is organized: lists of the most relevant or significant works, from his career, fact sheetstechnicalwith titles, dates, locations, lists of lectures, exhibitions, books. There is even an annual chronology of what he has been doing since 1982. This system is both aisbody of work as a way of thinking, which extends from theartisticto everyday life.
He always followed the same process, the miswhoever eatsin the system analsystemand and carried it over to the digital realm: mantisan archive of black-and-white negatives, color slides, and thousands ofdigital contact sheets. He selects, archives, and classifies.
Duarte Belo primarily photographs the territoryPortuguese. “It’s a conscious decision. I speak the language, I understand the rhythms,” he explains. And he rarely photographs people. Heisalso it a conscious decision: he says that when there are people in an image, they alter the structureof all other layers. “I want to create an anthropocentric work. The landscape is already deeply humanized, even when there are nopeople. The marks aretherethere: on the ground, on the walls, in the ruins, on the paths. People are present even when they are absent. And that is enough.”
Another key focus of his work is maps. He has maps marking all the sites he has photographed, others designed for film projects,film projects, or for planning trips. All of this helps him think about the territoryregionterritory.
There are 58 notebooks (all digitized!) that are perhaps among the most beautiful objects he ever produced. He makes drawings, sketches, and notes. He uses handwriting as a tool for orientation. Cartography is made using military maps, and records every stop. The text emerges from the images, as a way to continue what the photograph does not say. “And although writing is harder for me than photography, I’ve come to embrace writing out of necessity: to communicate better,” he asserts.
He organizes his work by project and by medium: books, exhibitions, and lectures. In the name ofhis, in co, with names such as Álvaro Domingues, Fernando Alves, João Abreu, Rui Lage. Both in his writing and in imagery, he seeks a form of rigor and sharing that makes the invisible visible. “My photographs are, to a certain extent, an attempt to construct a puzzle of the territoryof,” he explains simply.
You are organizing an eventcollectioncollection that, he confides, he would one day like to see made available to the public, in akindof the Portuguese Space Museum. “An interpretive center with documentation, models, exhibits, a library, a residence, a workshop. A place to be, to build, and to share.” So be it.
