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Still until 10 May 2009  you can admire Inês d’Orey’s photo series Porto Interior at Galleri Image, Aarhus (Denmark). I had the chance to see some of her work during the Fotofestival Mannheim_Ludwigshafen_Heidelberg 2007 and have thus already mentioned Porto Interior on this blog.

Inês d'Orey, Porto Interior, 80 x 80 cm, 2007 © Inês d'Orey

Inês d’Orey (*1977 in Porto), educated at the London College of Printing, won the FNAC Award for Talents in Photography in 2007. She photographs public and semi-public places in Porto, her home city, where she continues to reside. “The project had its starting point in d’Orey’s urge to examine places in the city that appear both strange and familiar; not so much ‘documenting’ Porto, therefore, as exploring the possible and impossible interiors of the city. In these photographs a sense of architectural detail, pattern and structure is combined with an eye for the very special atmosphere of place.” (quote PR release)

D’Orey portrays the interiors of public rooms – yet while normally being crowded with people, here they are  without human presence. The sceneries, ranging from sports-halls, parking lots, hotels, stairways, foyers and the most intimate private spaces, varying in their degree of ‘recognisability’, appear strange, fascinating and unreal. By means of photographic manipulations, d’Orey alters the urban motifs to create a certain atmosphere: Her aim is to capture the spirit of place and to intensify it.

“The onlooker imagines the diversity of human activity that might normally take place in these buildings and the possible stories that emanate from them. Distanced as they are from their current human context, the passage and the wear of time become distinct entities. (…). The emerging images, poised between the real and the mysterious, make the viewer conscious in a renewed way of the physical surroundings of his/her daily life.”(quote PR release)

In Aarhus, d’Orey’s photographs are shown with a video projection that incorporates sound recordings of people using the spaces in the photographs. The absence of humans in the images, and their corresponding presence in the sound, is part of the meaning of the exhibition.

I am very glad  that Inês d’Orey found the time to answer some questions which I will share with you in an interview soon.