Carlos Barradas | Ferry Tales (2018 - 20)
Carlos Barradas | Ferry Tales (2018 - 20)
Jury member Andreas Langen about 'Ferry Tales': 'Few photographers cultivate a strong sense of language, Carlos Barradas does. The sophisticated handling of the abstract parallel medium to the visual is part of his biography: Before studying photography in Milan, the Portuguese Barradas graduated in anthropology and worked and published internationally in research, science and literature projects. So Barradas can write, you can easily convince yourself of that, by means of his self-inquiries and notes on the submitted work with the wonderful title "Ferry Tales" - which in the English original directly alludes to the concept of fairy tales; an elegant and meaningful play on words, read it yourself! What Barradas, for reasons of the self-evident modesty of a clever author, does not elaborate on is the effect his pictures have on the viewer: one feels almost disconcertingly placed in the front row of a theatre audience, where one watches the figures of a modern and yet timeless production from very close up; without, incidentally, getting too close to a single one - a further indication of how perfectly formed Barradas acts. People are waiting, dreaming, longing and embracing each other, keeping still and waiting for things to happen, the human drive of a velvet black night. This is eye candy and brain food at its best. Chapeau!' Barradas about his work: 'Ferry Tales is the sight of a place that is out of all places: the vision of a reality that represents at the same time the solitude and the immensity, a second and the eternity. The vision of something trivial that can acquire an exceptional quality in our daily life, a piece circulating, stopping, floating in space. The following work explores the departure, the journey and the arrival of a ship, offering a rough perspective of reality and the imaginary, trying above all to reflect on why the ship is the heterotopia par excellence, because, in the words of Michel Foucault, in civilizations without boats dreams mingle, adventure is substituted by espionage and corsairs by the police.' Short bio: Barradas is a photographer with a PhD in Anthropology. He has a European Master in Contemporary Photography at the European Design Institute in Madrid, to which he was awarded a merit scholarship. In his work he engages with ambiguity. He positions his photographs in a liminal state, an anthropological concept that refers to an intermediate phase or condition in a given rite of passage. His intention is that the photographs become a receptacle in which people deposit their narratives. In that sense, they are transformed into a habitable space, where emotional statuses, memories, and social and cultural values come into play, defining one’s interpretation of the image. www.barradascarlos.com
Format:
Photo / Video
