Guilherme Strecht Monteiro
Is there any parallel between snap photography and the crafting of an ocarina? The alchemy of the moment, perhaps. Light and clay are shaped through rituals in which time takes form in unique objects.
Everything that is lost captivates Guilherme Strecht Monteiro (1969), who is interested in “doing things that we no longer know how to do.” That is “the magic,” he emphasizes, during a conversation about photography à la minute, which revealed itself to be the part that can be taken for the whole: the “gathering of knowledge,” of techniques and forms that contemporary life is gradually forgetting, and “experimentation”—its application in practice, in matter, in the firing of a nest of ocarinas in an open pit (like a soenga) with firewood and earth in the backyard, in the blind gestures in the darkroom, which, in its own way, is also a body of clay, malleable: the texture, the void, the air that fills the spaces, the claustrophobic darkness, the invisible breaths, and the work that is born at the exact moment of contact with air and light.
“Why shouldn’t I do this?” This thought has always been with this craftsman, a set designer at the Teatro de São João (Porto), who has been working in theater “just for fun” since he was 16 (he turned professional 30 years ago) and who has been adding “lost skills” to the carpentry techniques he inherited from his grandfather. “There are many crafts that come my way and that I end up keeping,” says Guilherme, who can sew by machine or by hand, mold clay, and “make just about anything.”
That’s what happened with the instant photography he first encountered at the age of five, at the Senhor de Matosinhos festival, “right after April 25.” “It stuck with me. I was amazed. How is it possible for a box to take photos that you get right away?”
The years went by, and Guilherme gathered scattered information on the subject. He realized that, in Porto, photographers roamed the gardens, the squares, and the mouth of the Douro. That the itinerant profession was a family tradition, passed down through generations, and that it traveled “from town to town, from place to place, from village to village,” just like the barber, the dentist, or the veterinarian. “People had a main profession and took photos on weekends, holidays, and during pilgrimages to earn some extra income. I’ve come across photographs with a stamp on the back,” explains the collector, who has even discovered the existence of scenes (landscapes, monuments, cars, and even comical scenes) beyond the famous little horse, where the youngest children would sit and dream.
Instant photography was once synonymous with family keepsakes, ID cards, or military registration cards. “It democratized photography, which, until then, had been the preserve of the elite,” he notes, mentioning, in this context, George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, who, in the early 20th century, sold his Brownie camera for a dollar. Guilherme himself, “self-taught,” began early on to practice analog photography (“which was all there was”), having set up his personal darkroom in his bedroom at the time. “It was always by trial and error.” And it was as a result of this that the “laboratory inside a box” emerged, along with the investigation of a phenomenon with various international focal points—from lambe-lambe to agüita photography, from minutero photographers to the Afghans (photographers and builders of kamra-e-faoree) whom Lukas Birk encountered and identified starting in 2006—the Austrian’s research highlights how the camera survived various regimes, including the Taliban, who imposed a near-total ban on all forms of visual representation and destroyed many cameras in recent decades.
The camera is a very simple box and contains everything needed to capture and develop an image. First the negative; then the positive. Guilherme built every part of his camera—which is “a hybrid” of a European box camera and an Afghan system—from the handle of the wooden box, which once served as his son’s changing table, to the tripod, the articulated lever, the cloth, the velvet sleeve, and even the Art Nouveau-style paintwork.
“It’s all mechanical—except for this little lamp. Everything else is as manual as possible. It’s almost prehistoric,” notes the creator of the Wonder Box project, the “wonder box” that Guilherme operates with patience and precision. “These days, people don’t build much anymore, even in theater—it’s increasingly stripped of sets.” And photography suffers from the same thing: “It’s like buying a new car that a mechanic doesn’t know how to open up and work on. Everything is lost”—including the actual photos themselves (“there’s no archive of anything”)—laments the portrait photographer.
Just as in artisanal pottery, where no two pieces are alike, this photographic style—a living, vulnerable emulsion—celebrates the unique and even imperfection as a signature of presence. Photographs or ocarinas: prints, dripping water droplets, development stains, streaks of light, human gestures that create reliquaries, objects we can hold in the palm of our hand, embrace, and remember.
