I was staying in the Hotel Borges at the top of Rua Garrett, watching television through a pair of socks I had left to dry on top of the screen whilst I packed my bags. For a few years, I had taken to visiting Lisbon, enjoying the light and the pace of life, the coastal air and the people and their way of doing things, and eating in the small, homely restaurants around the Barrio Alto. It had become my second home.
Glass had become my facilitator, in both the lens which forms the image on the emulsion, and in the windows down the street, into whose reflections one can fall, to discover a multi-layered world, simultaneously real and illusory. Lisbon is still mostly single-glazed, so the reflections are bright and sharp. There is a lot of grafitti, on the shop windows and the glass of the bus-stops. These are my favoured set-ups.
I was looking for the occluded image, the imperfect vision, images that went way beyond the flawless photo with which we are bombarded night and day in ceaseless advertising, which is read and processed by the brain in a micro-second, and as a result, now means less than nothing.
