Daniel BLAUFUKS (1963)

Daniel Blaufuks was born in Portugal in 1963, of Jewish descent.

After living in Germany for six years he returned to Lisbon where, beginning in 1987, he attended the photography course at the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Ar.Co). By the 1990s he was in London, where he continued his education at the Royal College of Art, and then later in New York at the Watermill Center. The beginning of his career was defined by free-lance contributions to various Portuguese publications (such as the Independente and Blitz newspapers and Marie Claire magazine). He then moved away from the confines of photojournalism, to establish his photographic discourse in the intentionality of photography, progressively used as an evocative and narrative field.

He started exhibiting regularly in the beginning of the 1990s and had his first individual exhibition at the Galeria Ether (Lisbon) after which he received the European Kodak Award, Arles 1994. With the photographic series My Tangier, 1991, Cinema Paraíso, 1991, London Dairies, 1994, Uma Viagem a São Petersburgo, 1998, Andorra, 2000, and Lisboa, Pessoa, Exílio, Saramago, 2001, the characteristics that define his plastic universe are progressively asserted. First of all Blaufuks resists the temptation to individualise the subject of photography, choosing instead to suggest a common interpretative ground, which detaches photography from any specificity (the majority of the photographs are of urban landscapes, united by their nature and not by their illustrative particularities). Secondly, he constructs a discourse filled with literary and cinematographic references that are mixed and interwoven with the artist’s personal life. Blaufuks portrays himself as the wandering-photographer, a road photographer, who stops at surprise encounters (with places, objects, people, situations). He also transposes the sense of immediacy inherent in photography to disturbingly reveal a time suspended between the identification of what you see, and the subjective character of the gaze that rests on the object. Finally Blaufuks’ work also reveals, on a descriptive level, a will to increase the image’s range of interpretations by choosing scenographic montages, and by using the book as a medium/body for a (possible) narrative, borne of the intra-remissive relationship between text and image.

Between the real and the fictional, quotation and evocation, Daniel Blaufuks’ work is increasingly disseminated in the experimentation of photography as an extended field of possibilities (perceptive and operative). If initially he explores densities resulting from the use of black and white, within enigmatic frames where light is used to define differentiated fields of vision, then his later work goes on to claim colour as a dominant presence in sets a highly pictorial nature. In the series Tasso of 1996, of which three prints were acquired by CAMJAP, the gaze on the object is diluted by games of light and shadow, transparency and opacity, which then become uniform under the restless movement of colour.

Other tensions can be added to those evoked by the object and its partial occultation, such as in Collected Short Stories of 2003. This group of short stories, made as a result of his travels through eight different countries, registers improbable encounters in urban daily life. In a game of fictions, partly generated by the viewer’s reading when confronted with these diptychs, Daniel Blaufuks establishes dialogues between sets of dissonant images. Following the rationale of montage and cinematographic sequence (mostly established in parallel with his works in film and video), the fictional suggestion is made possible by the pose or the (in)discrete passage of characters; by studied or spontaneous frames generating similarities or distances; and by the nostalgic value that withdraws each one of these images from the slow unfolding of a chronology and places them in an interior time and space – both the photographer’s and the viewers’.

ANA RUIVO