António Júlio DUARTE (1965)

António Júlio Duarte (born in 1965 in Lisbon) belongs to a generation of Portuguese photographers that had access to an organised and systematic photographic education in Portugal (mainly through Ar.Co – School of Art and Visual Communication – which he attended). This generation then sought to complete its education in schools abroad, and in Duarte’s case, attending the Royal College of Art at the beginning of the 1990s for a short but important period of time. The United Kingdom was a common place to go amongst his contemporaries, as was the case with José Luís Neto, Augusto Alves da Silva and Paulo Catrica. This interlude in a foreign country is particularly important because it outlines a generational tendency to establish contacts in the heart of an international system of artistic production and circulation. It also marks the search in loco for updated historical references and emerging practices in the universe of photography.

The work of António Júlio Duarte is characterised by the consistency with which the artist associates photography with his several journeys to the east (Macau, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc), while alternating these “ex-centric” trips with European ones. Duarte is interested in the process of “naturalizing” the differences that he finds in other countries and cities, and in other ways of occupying the street. In this sense the escape to the exotic, and the sensationalisation of the image are leitmotiven of his work. His work emphasises a fragmentary vision of locations, closer to an apparently ordinary register of the urban landscape.

In the series Berlin the street is an axis around which he organises and edits the image. The street, with its residual symbols of humanity, is the ultimate public space, and also the main subject of his photographs. Berlim (Berlin), or the “Open City” as it has emblematically become known since the fall of the wall in 1989, emerges here condensed in a passageway. Duarte’s decision to use the formula of a series, which is so structural in contrast to the remissive nature of his work, allows him to suggest a narrative with brief time lapses in a sequence of 12 images, all with the same framing. And which Berlin is shown here? Above all it is a nocturnal city, glimmering with artificial light and inhabited by people captured in rapid movement. The presence of a masculine figure in the center of the image, in a somewhat threatening, frontal position, is also artificial. He remains between the images, the unsolvable mystery in a set of apparently banal photographs. In the steadfastness of space over time a portrait of the city in transformation emerges, without the photographer actually moving.

In Antonio Júlio Duarte’s other guides such as Oriente-Ocidente (East-West) 1990-95, and Lótus (Lotus) Macau 1999-2001, each image establishes a stage of a journey while avoiding the clichés of the places that he travels to. However, Berlin can be considered an atypical series within the context of his work. This is also true of the disconcerting Peepshow (1999-2001), because of the way in which the artist varies the use of the photographic support and image.

The Berlin series deviates from Antonio Júlio Duarte’s other work, which has come to be recognised as “street photography”. However, this series successfully shows how “city photography” has been able to establish a more consensual, but equally active bridge, between photography, the fine arts and cinema in the enormous field of contemporary visual art, with its expansive and urgent need to reinvent sites of post modernity.