A reconstructed life · The Atlas
The photographer who is in none of his photographs
“O Retratista”✦Portugal✦1969–1990✦2 fragments
A village portraitist recorded everyone's face but his own. What remains of him is the negative space in a thousand other people's memories — the man behind the camera, reconstructed from the crowd he framed.
Follow this life on the Atlas- 01
The censored aerogramme
A censored aerogramme from Guinea, Mirandela · Winter, 1969
Father,
We are in good health, thanks be to God, and I hope this finds you and Mother the same. The heat here is a kind you don't know; the rains are worse. I cannot say where we are.
[seven words removed by the censor's blade]
Tell Mother the nights are the hardest, but not why. And do one thing for me, father — the portrait in the uniform, the plate: burn it. When I come home there will be no more portraits of me. I mean it.
Abel
- 02
The only portrait
The letter that carried the only portrait, Rüsselsheim · Autumn, 1990
Celeste, my daughter,
You ask me, as you have asked me for twenty years, for a photograph of your father. Daughter, I have photographed this town for forty-four years — every bride, every soldier, every child in white — and there is no photograph of me. The shoemaker's children go barefoot.
Today I closed the shop. Before I took the sign down, I stood where my customers stood, under my own lights, and I made one plate.
I am sending you the only face I have. Now you have more of me than the whole town does.
Your father