Paulo Nozolino

Usura, 2012.

Paulo Nozolino is one of the central figures of contemporary photography. His journey begins in the 70’s in London where he went to live. Then Paris, from the late 80s and throughout the 90s, was his basis for a long series of travels across the Arab World, as well as Europe, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Books like Penumbra and Solo are good examples of his political concerns with a changing society. He returned to Portugal in 2002, after an anthological exhibition – Nada – at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. In 2005, Museu de Serralves, in Porto, invited him to a new anthological– Far Cry – first time ever to show work by a Portuguese photographer.

A frontal artist, Nozolino sees photography the same way he sees life, using it to understand both the world and himself and taking it to the limits of his quest, his answers and his experiences. There is no room for complacency in his work. Destruction means destruction, death means death. Constant cycles in his historical time ‘par excellence’, the Twentieth Century, and even more alive in the present moment, as is stated in his most recent works, bone lonely, Makulatur, Usura and Gloom.

Public recognition accompanies the artist’s work from the beginning. Awards such as the Villa Médicis (1994), in France, or the Grande Prémio Nacional de Fotografia (2006) and the Prémio Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores (2013), in Portugal, are reflections of such notoriety.

From: http://www.quadradoazul.pt/en/qa/artist/paulo/

Interview: http://www.academia.edu/3277468/_Second_Hand_Visions_in_conversation_with_Paulo_Nozolino_

Excerpt:

It gets really tricky when ideas turn into violent acts. Anyway, I think we should never forget that language was invented to dominate. I am very wary of words. I’m a photographer. Poets they don’t mean much anymore, but the pure image, the one that is not manipulated, still rings with some truth in me.

Pasolini’s interview with Pound is great and also important, because it was politically incorrect to talk about Pound, as it wasincorrect to talk about Céline. I think that today there should be no timefor intellectual guilt. For me the only thing that really matters, is that  Pound was true to Pound. I like people who are true to themselves.Truth was always my question: How to be true to myself? How to deal with the world outside? I mean we are sitting here, it’s raining outside, we are quite comfortable, but there are people out there shivering, they have no money and food, and it’s miserable. Every time I get my cameraand look at this people, I ask myself: What do I do? Do I ignore them?Do I photograph them? My photography has always come from thestreets, never from the studio or from a concept.