The new body of work by Portuguese photographer, Virgílio Ferreira, entitled Being and Becoming. Couched in a symbolic, literary mode of photography, the series is a subjective and dreamy meditation on the lives and environments of several migrant workers from Portugal, who left their country of birth to start a new life in new lands, principally due to economic reasons.

That certain something is indeed incredibly subtle and nuanced. Arriving in these quiet yet intense photographs, figures vie for prominence but are routinely blurred and shift in and out of focus amid expansive landscapes, while at other times their depiction gives way to shadows or simply teeters on the threshold of visibility altogether. Ferreira’s images appear fluid, unfixed and transitory, as are the subjects he portrays. They play with diffuse traces, obstructions and layers of dappled light to lock us in moments where elements of past and future coalesce with the present.

In a sense, the photographs seen in Being and Becoming are more like a collection of proverbs that speaks to certain universal truths. Something is happening here that heralds a unity of opposites, a flux doctrine that ultimately points to the way things are the same and not the same over time. Now is then: what came before comes after...

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Virgílio Ferreira's series embodies this very contemporary idea because it defies certainty with a set of images that create both a social documentary and an artistic visual narrative, addressing the Portuguese migratory universe in a metaphoric and indeterminate way. Thus, it is an open social art work where each of us can create our story revealing more than what is just real, making us feel and understand in a very personal and poetical way how Portuguese diaspora and life are part of a global world.

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In his photographic work, Virgílio Ferreira offers us an unstable approach to the question of identity – a permanent work in progress –, focusing on the condition of migrants in Europe. The question couldn’t be more relevant today. From the tragedy of Lampedusa and the illegal migrants from North Africa, to the nationalistic drives of Catalonia, the German hegemony or the almighty kingdom of the language of finance, we fail to see the mystique of the unity in diversity of a Europe ranging from the Atlantic to the Urals...

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It is also up to social science to identify the conditions of reproduction of creativity and setbacks in which migrations are inscribed. Only an adequate objectification of such conditions will allow for the overcoming of the analysis of migration processes informed by recurrent and resurrected ethnocentric barriers, as well as for a more precise definition of the possibilities of building migrations as a space for the affirmation of citizenship. It is also in this light that we can understand Being and Becoming.

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Keeping an image slightly out of focus was already discussed from the very first introduction of the medium of photography, but the direction in which it should be taken has always been under scrutiny – until this very day. At the heart of that discord was its dual character: the capacity of photography to produce a subjective (or even poetic) expression on the one hand, and its ability to capture a dry and descriptive document of reality on the other. It is exactly at that corridor that we can find Virgilio Ferreira, a century or so after the initial experimentations, as he diligently pushes the boundaries of the medium.

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The pictures in the Passages series by Virgílio Ferreira are placed in a ground that, beginning with the traditional photography device, develop not in the sense of that realistic ideal but of another kind of analog representation which, starting from the external reality, are more concerned with the Subject as seer than with the object that is seen.

The style and technique which is used is, in fact, common to other works of Virgílio Ferreira, as 'Uncanny Places', or 'Daily Pilgrims' where a city is associated to a fluid presence, or where the entire image appears dismembered, with a wrecked appearance.

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What is this fear that is taking hold of our feelings in the end of the millennium? What troubles and confounds our experience and reason? What is it that threatens, intimidates and terrifies us? (Mário Perníola, Enigmas: the Egyptian moment in society and art, 1995)

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We are living a culture of enigma. And enigma, which has always nourished our relationship to the world and others, originates from a vague but intermittent consciousness of the collapse between the past and the future. This happens when the ancient past and the possible future are both collapsed into a present beyond perceivable measure; then, past and future are not only alike but also indiscriminate. This happens when men more so identify with things – with landscapes – and thus the inorganic world where electronic technology substitutes man in the perception of phenomena. And in our post-historical, crypto-criminal and neo-obscurantist world, (*), where blackmail is the principal weapon, the act of resistance can be the enigma itself, insofar as it allows the discovery of diverse meanings and multiple interrogations...

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Virgilio’s works rebel against Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘The Decisive Moment’. According to Bresson, ‘Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.

'The Decisive Moment’ can establish a visual order, which have its influence on the photography world for a long time. Virgilio’s ‘Uncanny Places’ seems to indulge in the uncertainty and impreciseness of the inside and outside of an event. Even the event itself is being overlapped. A sense of turning away and revolt can be easily detected.

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El error fotográfico como indicio: explorando la relación entre la fotografía y la experiencia de la ciudad en Daily Pilgrims de Virgilio Ferreira.

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Mystic, poetic and introspective, the photography of Virgilio Ferreira (Porto, 1970) transgresses the borders between reality and dream, affinity and remoteness, earthy corporeality and sublimity. Though inextricably linked with the “battlefield” of everyday life through travels to geographically identifiable places and encounters with local “anthropologies”, Ferreira’s work goes as a whole beyond any plain documentary approach. It transmits the “aura” of a “palpable” human truth blurred by globalization and multiculturalism.

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Em todas as grandes cidades do mundo encontramos estes indícios, estes sinais do tempo que vivemos – estes neons, estes entardeceres, esta agitação de corpos, de máscaras e de olhares. A cidade contemporânea faz-se fotograficamente abrindo ou mostrando as brechas da inquietação da sua disciplina.

As fotografias, que nos oferecem uma sugestão de realidade, são fragmentos imprecisos de totalidades ausentes; é o nosso olhar cultural que reconstitui o sentido do cenário, que lhe empresta ruído e significado num inequívoco consenso de memórias e desejos: um fotógrafo é predador, sabe utilizar as argúcias de um predador.

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O percurso de Virgílio Ferreira, permite-nos afirmar estarmos em presença de um dos mais rigorosos fotógrafos nacionais na área do retrato. Contudo, nesta série, “Daily Pilgrins”, o autor decidiu quebrar as regras académicas da iluminação e composição tradicionais daquele território fotográfico, para nos fazer mergulhar num ambiente bem mais obscuro, que nos obriga a uma análise transcendente aos paradigmas comuns da imagem fotográfica.

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Na Terra Prometida, global e iluminada, a Terra de Ninguém, sem centro e sem ribalta. No O Jardim quotidiano, o reverso do local da peregrinação. Aqui chegámos, esvaziados, desencantados, coisificados, sem sentido. Peregrinos da racionalidade e da desalienação, da consciência histórica e da objectividade, da profanização e da individualidade, da ciência e da prospecção, da liberdade e da transgressão, da pluralidade e da civilidade.

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