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An exhibition at Porto presents new works of Portugese photographer Inês d’Orey‘s striking, ongoing series “Porto Interior”. To find out more about Inês’ work and her intentions, please read this interview she gave deconarch.com some time ago.

© Inês d'Orey

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Porto Interior

From 12^th March until 15^th May 2011.

Edifício da Ex-Cadeia e Tribunal da Relação do Porto

Porto, Portugal

www.cpf.pt

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PR info: Inês d’Orey returns with new incursions through Porto, scattered in time and space. After de New Talent Fnac Photography 2007, the (re)discovery of the city has been continued. Unlike immediate appearances, the city seems to be growing, intimately.

When punctuated by the absence of any human being, the public and semi-public interiors spaces of the city are hit by an alteration in the meaning and in the identity imprinted on Porto. What the city represents becomes thereby more extreme. These spaces, apparently stagnant, transform themselves into a series of generic places, existing and subsisting in a lost time.

Therefore, these images are offered as stages, always with a different story to tell. The intention is not to document as an objective process, but rather to explore the possibility and the impossibility of a porto interior, where one arrives and remains.

As I already announced, here is the interview with young Portuguese photographer Inês d’Orey. I am happy that Inês found the time to answer some questions about her work – thanks Inês!!

Her fascinating photo series Porto Interior can still be seen at Galleri Image, Aarhus (Denmark) until May, 10, 2009. So if you happen to hang around in Denmark – don’t miss the chance!

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Fenianos 2 (from: Porto Interior), 80 x 80 cm, 2007 © Inês d'Orey

Inês, what can we see at Aarhus?

The exhibition Porto Interior in Galleri Image, presents a selection of 14 large format photographs, part of my ongoing project of  representing empty interiors of public and semi-public spaces in Porto, Portugal. The photographs are exhibited in conjunction with a video projection that incorporates sound recordings of people using the spaces in the photographs.

What is your intention with Porto Interior?

Porto Interior functions as a collection of spaces that I search and find throughout the city. These interiors are photographed absent of any human presence. Familiar places like theatres, swimming pools or staircases, used by people on a daily basis, become stages for a story that is never clear, but that doesn’t need to be clear.  Through digital manipulation, I alter  the photographs subtly until I create  the atmosphere I find appropriate.

Why photography? Why did you become a photographer?

Photography, because it provides the possibility of communicating from a physical and objective reality at the same time, with a subjective subtext underneath. And those two elements put together create a really interesting provocation.

What does art mean to you, which possibilities does it offer?

What is art?

Piscina de Campanhã (from: Porto Interior), 80 x 80 cm, 2007 © Inês d'Orey

How do you choose your motifs?

There isn’t a rule. I’m inspired everyday by different sources that, at a certain point, come together and result in an idea.

Who / What are your role models? Who / What influenced your work?

I never had any role models, specially in photography. My main influences come from cinema , painting and illustration.

In many projects, you focus on architecture, resp. rooms/interiors as well as “space” in general. Why? What does architecture / space mean to you?

Until I finished my degree in photography, I had never been particularly interested in architecture. But then, I started to work with an architecture photographer and was, in a way, „forced” to photograph space! That much delivery and exposure to architecture and being always surrounded by architects made me, slowly, start to acquire a special interest in it. And it reached the point of being, at the moment, my main interest.

What is it that you are interested in when portraying architecture/buildings and people?

The beauty of the form and light, the curiosity of the functionality, the misterious possibility of an unclear narrative.

The everyday usage of spaces tends to make them invisible, indiferent. The more you use the space, the more you ignore it. What photography does is, it selects, focuses your attention and tells you where to look.

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

What are your ambitions with your photographs (esp. your “urban” works, but also in a broader point of view)?

I want to trigger the viewer’s imagination: what strange story is happening here? I like to think that the viewer will feel, more than rationalize the photograph.

What – in your opinion – is characteristical of your work and your working method?

I always plan and think through before I photograph. I never go out with my camera waiting for something to happen.

I think I could say that my work conceptually stages reality.  I’m more interested in “creating a moment”, more than “catching the moment”.

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.

All good things come, well, in two: I have another exhibition tip to tell you about:

Circulation(s)
Photography exhibition with 17 photographers.
Opening on the 5th November, from 19h00.
La Cartonnerie
12 rue Deguerry 75011 Paris
From the 4th to the 29th November.

More information at www.fetart.org and especially here (Press Info / Pdf)

According to their website, fetart presents their exhibition “Circulation(s) – Mois de la Photo-OFF 2008 , regards de jeunes photographes européens”, i.e.  views of young European photographers.

FêtArt is a team of 5 voluntary co-workers. The online gallery is devoted to exhibiting and discovering young contemporary photography artists.

Just quickly browsing the website, I noticed several interesting works which are worth a second, and more intensive glance (not all of them have a special focus on architecture, of course, but still there are some interesting discoveries to make which I ‘ll try and specify a little more soon)

Among the 17 photographers is Inês d’Orey. The other photographers are:

Dana Cojbuc, Romania / Loulou D’Aki, Sweden / Gabrielle Duplantier, France / Ben Elwes, England / Nicolas Fussler, France / Sarah Gerats, Finland / Camille Hervouet, France / Elis Hoffman, Sweden / Maureen Kägi, Switzerland / Stéphanie Lacombe, France / Federico Mannella, Italia / Davide Monteleone, Italia / Christel Ooms, Holland / Myrto Papadopoulos, Greece / Bostjan Pucelj, Slovenia / Malene Nors Tardrup, Denmark

Are you looking for a spontaneous getaway and have no idea where to go? Why not to Portugal –

in November, there is a photography show at Guimarães presenting new works by Inês d’Orey, a young Portuguese photographer I introduced you a while ago.

Volver
Escola de Arquitectura

Universidade do Minho

Guimarães

31.10.2008 – 30.11.2008

More information here

The exhibition VOLVER presents works that portray the architecture school’s new building by Fernando Távora and Jose Bernardo Távora:

(about the architecture school)

DAA (Departamento de Arquitectura) used to operate in temporary facilities at the University campus in Azurém, Guimarães. In September 2004, it moved to the School of Architecture building, designed by the architects F. Távora and J.B. Távora, facing the new buildings of the School of Sciences and School of Engineering. Manuel Fernandes described the edifice as a “long straight corridor, forming a long and elegant body … it systematically distributes all the successive internal spaces that cross it. These are, namely: the lounge spaces, access to the external yard, lecture theatres, library, administrative area and, finally, access to another long wing of the building. Together with the first corridor-body, it forms an L shape and is the location for the offices, laboratories and classrooms. [...] The unique view to the secular and symbolic castle is the constant ‘Leitmotiv’ in these classrooms…”

(original quote here)

(The following info are citations from the exhibition profile – as I don’t know Portuguese, it’s just a rough translation of the most important thoughts that I could make out).

Shot between July and August 2008 – i.e. during summer holidays -, d’Orey’s photographs document the empty, silent rooms. The atmospheric pictures poses questions like: What does a library without books make a library? Is a garage without cars still a garage? Can we still call it “library” or “garage”?

There’s nothing in these photographs that allows us to call the portrayed building a School of Architecture.

The way d’Orey reduces architecture to form reminds of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Yet unlike the Bechers, her pictures don’t legitimate themselves from a pretended objectivity and neutrality, but she uses the means of her medium to dramatize space.

(UPDATE)

Inês d’Orey (*1977 Porto) ist eine junge portugiesische Fotografin, die 2007 für ihre Serie „Porto Interior“ mit dem Fnac Prize New Photography Talent ausgezeichnet wurde.

Ein paar Aufnahmen dieser Reihe habe ich beim 2. Fotofestival Mannheim_Ludwigshafen_Heidelberg 2007 „Reality Crossings“ gesehen. Die Fotografin ist zwar nicht auf Architekturaufnahmen ausschließlich spezialisiert, aber „Porto Interior“ ist auf jeden Fall eine Erwähnung wert.

“I’m looking for the uncomfortable and asphyxiating banal, the sad and melancholic proximity. […] My aim is not to document these spaces, but to explore the possible and the impossible in an interior harbor.”

Campanhâ (Schwimmbad/swimming pool)

Porto Interior zeigt Aufnahmen von (meist) öffentlichen, aber menschenleeren Innenräumen in d’Oreys Heimatstadt Porto. Die Künstlerin hat diese Bilder selbst aufgenommen und anschließend digital bearbeitet.

Entstanden sind entrückt wirkende Szenerien in Farben, die wie von einer andere Welt wirken. Die eigentlich vertrauten Orte erscheinen durch die Bearbeitung fremder, ungewohnter, spannender, anziehender. Alltägliche Räume, denen man sonst nicht viel Aufmerksamkeit schenkt, werden plötzlich ganz anders wahrgenommen.

Mehr Bilder nicht nur zu Porto Interior auf der Website der Fotografin.

PS: Ich habe mich in dieser Beschreibung auch am Katalog des Fotofestivals orientiert; dort wird der missverständliche Aussage gegeben “Ihre Motive findet sie in historischem Bildmaterial, das sie … digital überarbeitet”. Tatsächlich hat die Fotografin die Bilder aber selbst aufgenommen und nicht, wie ich zuvor geschrieben hatte, mit alten historischen Fotografien gearbeitet. Ich habe meinen Artikel daher entsprechend korrigiert.

Inês d’Orey (*1977 Porto) is a young Portugese photographer who won the Fnac Prize New Photography Talent 2007 for her series “Porto Interior”.

I could see some pictures of this series at the 2. Fotofestival Mannheim_Ludwigshafen_Heidelberg 2007 „Reality Crossings“. Even though the photographer is not specialized in architecture photography only, „Porto Interior“ is still worth mentioning.

“I’m looking for the uncomfortable and asphyxiating banal, the sad and melancholic proximity. […] My aim is not to document these spaces, but to explore the possible and the impossible in an interior harbor.”

Porto Interior shows photographs of (mostly) public, but deserted interior spaces of d’Orey’s home town Porto. The artist took the pictures herself, and digitally modified them afterwards.

Thus, she created sceneries seemingly disconnected from reality, with colours that appear to be from another world. After the modification, the usually familiar spaces appear strange, unknown, more exciting, attracting. Topical spaces, generally not really noticed, are suddenly perceived in a totally different way.

More info not only about “Porto Interior” on the artist’s website.

PS: When writing this article I also used the fotofestival’s catalogue for information; yet there is provided the somewhat misleading sentence “D’Orey finds her motifs in historical images which she digitally reworks…”. Actually the photographer has taken the pictures herself and did not, as I have written before, used old historic photographs. Thus I have corrected the article accordingly.