TEXT BY PETER GORDON | ASIAN REVIEW OF BOOKS/ TRANSLATION DAISY WONG
A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro’s photographs of Macau are certainly worth that and more. This latest collection consists of 100 photos taken during the last five years, a period which included Covid-19. The photojournalist, who has been a resident in Macau for well over a decade, manages both to capture something of the inexpressible essence of the city, as well to provide visuals that will intrigue and engage anyone interested in cities and the people who live in them. The “poética” of the title is apt.
His new book Poética Urbana is artistically laid out on matte paper, making use of significant amounts of white space, unlittered (as it were) with captions, an omission which is only a drawback if those who know Macau try to figure out exactly where (the unobvious) ones were taken. Each photo undoubtedly has a story, but Lobo allows us to tell our own. Given the book’s format, some wider photos must unfortunately cross the book’s gutter, but some compromises are inevitable.
Like his last outing O que foi, não volta ser… (What was, won’t be again), in which he matched old photos of Macau with present-day scenes, Poética Urbana is also very much about transitions: it is, he writes in the briefest of introductions: “a complication of diverse moments, mostly lives captured in the old neighbourhoods of the territory, where one can still feel that special pulse of a Macao that barely exists anymore, but sill rightly resists complete disappearance.”
Lobo Pinheiro is much taken with people in the streets, on buses, walking, going about their daily lives, mostly oblivious of him as photographer, although sometimes taking part. He’s also partial to umbrellas: his Macau is often wet, with darkly-lit corners, more Macau after the monsoon than the brightly-coloured images of the tourist pitch. This is Macau of back streets, small shops, bus stops, worktops, crosswalks, and motorcycles: the casinos and other latter-day developments for the tourist trade are largely absent.
Poética Urbana is very much the portrait of a community, one of which Lobo Pinheiro is himself a part and helping to safeguard.
Available at the Portuguese Bookstore
