Photographer Neal Slavin portrays Portugal’s change on display in Gaia
Five black and white images of Portugal from 19 of 19, and 50 color photographs from the years 2068, 2019 photos show “Saudade/Portugal”, by Neal Slavin, opened this Thursday.
In the exhibition “Saudade/Portugal”, which will be on display at the World of Wine gallery, in the historic area of Vila Nova de Gaia until October 31, visitors “will not see photos of people at war, but will see images of a people who lives in submission,” reads the written statement that Neal Slavin made for the show.
There are no military, but class division and force of enormous magnitude”, the declared images Neal Slavin, 81 years old and that marked this Thursday at the opening of his long photographic exhibition and without the presence of launch of his long documentary photographic exhibition “Saudade: A love letter to Portugal”.
The American Neal Slavin arrived in Portugal at the age of 27, in 1968, as a Fulbright grantee to photograph archaeological ruins in Conímbriga.
However, Slav of emigrants, born, children of emigrants, from Russia could not fail to notice the “nightmare of Salazar’s dictatorship” in which the Portuguese people lived.
In cases of photographers being “against the will of the Government, and some illegal”, Neal Slavin could not resist capturing the Portuguese in Coimbra, Portugal dos Pequenitos, Santuário de Fátima, Avenida da Liberdade, in Lisbon, or in the beaches of Praia da Nazaré, where he captured the wrinkles of a Nazarene fishmonger that “looked like a map”.
In 2016, when he returned to Portugal, Slavin traveled the country to “take a series of photographs to compare and contrast with what he found on his first visit”.
“While nostalgia in 1968 was sad and hopeless, 2016-2019 was full of joy and nostalgia, the joy of melancholy. Difficult to understand? I hope my photos convey the joy of seeing and at the same time celebrate the joy of soul – the Portuguese soul”, declared Neal Slavin, revealing that for him there was always a “tangential relationship between Portuguese Portuguese Catholicism”.
The exhibition presents 100 photographs that stem from his passion for Portugal, reflected in the book he edited in 1971, “Portugal”, and in the documentary feature film that he finished in Lisbon, “Saudade: A love letter to Portugal”, with the collaboration of figures Portuguese like Carlos do Carmo, Mariza or Nuno Gama.
Neal Slav has directed William H. Macy, Laura Dern, Meat Loaf and David Pay in cinema and has photographed famous film and music stars such as Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Barbra Streisand and Collins.
The artist has already exhibited in spaces such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, or the Center Georges Pompidou, in Paris.