Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions "a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera." Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. João Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.
June 6, 2022, after midnight
I had the habit of carrying a camera over my shoulder to record whatever crossed my path, like a writer taking notes, a forgetful historian who wanted to leave a statement, or a scientist making an inventory of the world. To photograph is to see with a trained eye, to crop and keep what one sees. Upon taking the picture, the photographs became engraved in my mind, like mirrors of what I once was. They are eternal instants, frozen in a personal museum.
I shall open this museum. It will be my legacy, though with this decision I'm not announcing that I’m about to die. Death hovers around old people like me, but it likes surprises. It came near many times without my knowing it at the time. Now, to keep it at bay, all I’d have to do is sell myself to science and then exchange my old organs for new ones. They say that I could even recover my eyesight. I stubbornly insist on remaining a natural being, like wormy organic apples that rot more easily. There are those who prefer them to apples treated with radiation that keeps them beautiful and shiny for weeks on end.
When I left Joana and Rio de Janeiro two decades ago, I kept a photographic diary for a little over a year. It’s the most personal thing in my files. But time has rid me of its sentimental, complaining style. Now, it evokes in me drier, more realistic interpretations. But I still remember it, page after page, because each one of them exhales feelings. Those photographs reveal themselves in rich detail in my memory, even more than if it were possible to see them. They’re like Stieglitz clouds; each one equals an emotion. My blindness reveals their essence, for in the end, to best see a photograph, you have to close your eyes.
The idea of using this diary as the basis for writing my book came to me while talking today to my goddaughter Carolina. She spent the entire morning here and brought me a version of Clarice Lispector’s stories on Brasília that I could listen to on my computer.
–Godfather, if you won the lottery, what would you do with the money? she asked me with the sweet voice that reminds me of her mother’s.
–Me? Nothing. If I could see, I would watch films and more films and I would start taking photographs again.
My blindness keeps me from seeing Carolina. But it’s as if I could see her. Her voice updates the face and body of the child I saw growing up. She would have the same dark, straight hair; the same clever, dark eyes; the same fair complexion.
–Don’t you want to organize your files?
When a girl of twenty poses such a question to an old man of seventy, she could easily word it as a threat, which Carolina didn’t do out of politeness, but even so, I heard: "if there is anything of any value in this infinity of boxes and computer files, it would be better for you to sort it out before you die, otherwise, it’s destined for the trash." My files are now roughly sorted into landscapes, portraits, nudes, photos of former President Paulo Antonio Fernandes and of Vila Paulo Antonio, and other themes of lesser importance. Carolina is capable of digitizing whatever I need and of reordering my files on the computer. I was the one who created her interest in computers, as her mother once told me.
–Godfather, I have a friend who wants to be a photographer. She admires your work and she’s looking for an internship. It would be amazing if she could have access to your files.
I asked her to describe her friend.
–She’s dark . . . She sings. Plays the guitar . . . She’s twenty-five.
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