António Júlio Duarte has photographed in several places around the world, almost always focusing on where documentary and personal photography intersect. Part of his work has focused on the Far East, with visits to Macau, Mainland China and Japan, among other places.
Your work is what we might call “street photography”, with documentary features, but at the same time with a deeply subjective, personal feel. What is it that makes you shoot this way?
I am interested in documentary photography, this relationship with the real, whatever that may be. My work is always about anything that is external to me; it is always about the other, about the place. Progressively, I think that I have increasingly moved away from this documentary approach, in the literal sense of the word – producing documents, objectives, neutrals – not least because we know that this objectivity does not exist, but it is one of the perceptions of the “document”. It is more about using all this for a more personal, subjective record, a comment about something. This makes me feel a bit like being in a kind of limbo, without knowing what this photography is that I do. It is a place that I like, that limbo, even though it is difficult for me to resolve it, to know where I am. I like to be in that place where I always have to question what I do, why I do it, what use are the images I make, if any?
The city is a very present theme in your photography, showing the complexity of this place, which we sometimes only know superficially. What interests you in the less visible layers of the city?
I am interested in how a city is made up of so many layers, so many parallel cities, how it all coexists. Photography is good for that, because it is a pretext, a justification for accessing anything, to satisfy your curiosity. Photography serves as a justification for being able to be in a place that is not yours, to be able to move from one city to another. I have always been more interested in people, the way they inhabit the space, what the city’s activities are. But now the interest has grown. It is a general idea of the city. It is not that important to me where the photographs are taken.
How did your relationship with Macau start?
In 1990, due to various circumstances, I had the opportunity to spend some time traveling and I wanted to go to Asia, to the Far East, and I had acquaintances in Macau. From Macau, I went to Thailand and several other places, so it was a kind of gateway. I spent a few weeks in Macau, where everything was very strange at the time, coming from Lisbon. Then I continued to develop work and in 1995 I did East/West, the book and the exhibition, which was featured in Macau, at the Orient Foundation, and then in Beijing, also with the support of the Orient Foundation. Like everyone else, I think I have a strange relationship with Macau … It is not something that I can explain in a rational way, but I can always think of working in Macau. Perhaps due to the characteristics of the territory, it is a kind of studio for me. Sometimes I hate that and say that I will never come back, but the truth is that I am always coming back to do something, it is cyclical.
In the book White Noise, the absence of people is notable, despite the fact that the photographs were taken in Macau casinos, spaces that are usually crowded with people. What motivated this choice to not include people?
At that time, in 2010-11, the casinos were not so crowded. I did White Noise in a kind of limbo, the casinos were almost all open, but the space was not so busy. In addition, the photographs were taken in the dead of night. I would go out to photograph around midnight and return home at five or six in the morning, and during that time, the rooms were not so crowded, there were no tour groups, and fewer people.
And you never wanted to photograph people?
The work was not defined like that, even because on the gaming floor, it is expressly prohibited to photograph. And the work was more about how I circulated in those spaces, how I related to a strange space, in a good sense, what the space, the materials, the ostentation told me. White Noise is perhaps one of my most personal works.
In The Candidate, which follows Chui Sai On’s 2009 campaign for chief executive, a notable feature of the images is the absence of frontal photographs of the candidate. Why is this?
I wanted the work to be particular, about this unique thing that was the campaign, and therefore many of the images were about the photographers themselves. I didn’t want the job to be very marked by the candidate’s face, I wanted it to stay in that unspecific place … it only has an effective reading, or an interest, in the orbit of Macau, but on the other hand, I wanted the job to assume the candidate as a generic candidate.
Considering that you often work on the street, in close proximity to people, sometimes in very crowded places, how has this pandemic impacted on your work?
A lot. For me, it has been a time of pause. I didn’t want to have an immediate response to this as a photographer, so it was a pause, a time to think about what I’m going to do next. I had no interest in going to photograph empty streets and people in masks. There are people who will be doing this, because it is necessary to produce documents about this, but I did not want to do it. I shoot every day, and in a different way, because I’m limited in space now, but I think I’ll need time to figure it out.
Do you still shoot on film?
Yes. Using film does not have anything to do with thinking that it is better than digital … for me they are different languages, with different rhythms. Film has a lot to do with my work process, with a certain slowness. And I like that, those periods where I don’t see the work, the existence of anything tactile. Above all, I like the discipline of film, the number of frames you have per roll, the limitations that it brings you, the inability to see the work while I’m photographing, which forces me to create visual memories about it. Ideally, between shooting and starting to choose images, the more time that passes, the better.
In addition to numerous exhibitions, in Portugal and abroad, António Júlio Duarte has published several books, including East West (1995) and White Noise (2011), which featured photographs taken in Macau casinos and was one of the books selected as the best photography book of 2011 by North American Photo Eye magazine, and was nominated for the best international photography book at Photoespaña 2011. He also followed Chui Sai On’s 2009 election campaign to collect material for The Candidate.
