Pepe DINIZ (1945)

A freelance photographer in New York since 1975, Pepe Diniz (born in Tangier, 1945) is internationally renowned both for his images of cities and especially for his portraits of artists, writers, singers, photographers and other creative people whom he has come across at given moments and have become part of his world and work. The set of images in the CAMJAP collection are excellent samples of these accomplished portraits, mainly from 1970-80. Several of his works have been published in magazines, of which the Canadian magazine OVO (see also Jorge Guerra) deserves particular attention.

The son of a Romanian mother and an Indian and Portuguese father, Pepe Diniz never lived in Portugal but considers Portuguese his language. His childhood and adolescence were spent in Spain, Mozambique, and South Africa; in Switzerland, he studied Photography after the age of 24 at the Institut de Photographie de Genève; later in France, he became a photographer for the French Cinematheque (Paris 1972-74). Afterwards he worked in Brussels and New York, where, in 1975, he founded the Bleecker Gallery– New York being the city he has chosen to live and work in.

A “city of foreigners”, photogenic due to its diversity rendering it paradoxically unique), New York is Pepe Diniz’s preferred stage for a large number of his photographs. His photographs are intrinsically urban, a condition that is constructed and artificial. Therefore they prefer the streets to the studio, the challenge of the unforeseen to a system of standardisation, delegating to the camera the degree of manipulation of the photographs. It is in the (experimental) lab and not in the studio (set) where Pepe Diniz minutely works each image, once again affecting, through optic and chemical choices, each stage of the transfiguration of the people and things photographed. Each portrait is, therefore, a “moving-life”, an image physically and metaphorically touched by the photographer, “an interpretation of the person portrayed”, to use the artist’s own words.

In this gallery of remarkable people, especially renowned today, we find the faces and milieu that constitute Pepe Diniz’s own biography: Man Ray, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauchenberg, Salvador Dalí, Roy Lichtenstein, John Cage, Jorge Luis Borges, Glauber Rocha, Robert Frank, as well as Sarah Affonso, Thomaz de Mello, Louis Dourdil and Amália Rodrigues, each captured with a profound and intimate compliance. This intimacy is, after all, an interim conquest of the image, where difference asserts itself in the ironic and irreverent detail, at times a detail that appears at the margin of the photographed subject.

Thus, each photograph is the result of a pre-existing relationship, personalised in its different constitutive stages: from perception to editing, including all the intermediate steps (image capturing, development, blow-up, fixing, and finally, editing). Or, as Pepe Diniz would say: “I enjoy photography because I can use it as a passport that gives me access to other human beings and to a variety of things that interest me. [...] Since I’m not particularly interested in understanding advanced photographic technique, I always use the same developer for the films and for the blow-ups. The paper is almost always the same. Like this the journey has few variables but the landscape is always new.”

LÚCIA MARQUES