Hybrid Landscape

Review of “Pearl” by Mário Teixeira da Silva for FNAC New Talents Award

Landscape is the leitmotif of Tiago Casanova, who won the second prize. Nevertheless, the photographer does not go after the probable beautiful color photo, but rather goes for small format black and white Polaroid images. They are reminiscent of the common photographs of old-time photo albums, with their jagged edges reinforcing this reading. Registering the fragments of a landscape in small-format black and white photos, the photographer creates a somehow detached perspective, a travel diary in which he registers the often-chaotic aspects of human intervention on the landscape. In this port-folio, we find details that are formally interesting, others that approach the sublime, and some that depict elements of a landscape that transmit a certain awkwardness, when not irony, produced by the inconsequential actions of human beings.

Translated by José Roseira