The two photographic projects shown here were selected from a broader set of works developed by students at Project, a Curricular Unit of the Master in Image Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP) in the 2019-2020 academic year, for the research project Visual Spaces of Change (VSC) (Coordinated by FAUP via the AAI group).

Hialino

by Beatriz Ferreira

I use photography as a means of documenting the world around me. I take pictures so I can recall them later. For me, photography is an extensive memory of all moments that I have lived. For this project, we were directed to circumscribe ourselves in the Porto Metropolitan Area. To me, this project required stronger foundations to become real. After some self-reflection, I realized that the intention of my project was to travel to the limits of the city and follow the paths that thousands of people take every day. The name I gave to this project is Hialino (Hyaline). Hialino means transparent like water. This is the exact description of what I saw as I looked through the glass windows of the train. Since this is what I saw, it only made sense to replicate what me and all of the other passengers see on their daily commutes. All of them were captured inside a train and all have the reflection of the inside on the glass. This photographic series emerges on a journey through the train tracks of Porto. These photos were taken in order to show the paths that we can take throughout them but ended up becoming a psychological journey over the plains of Porto. My choice of subject comes from my interest in landscape and architecture photography. I was able to document how unalike the city of Porto is and how all the different parishes differ from each other. Whether we are closer to the sea or inland, I was still able to find and capture the natural environment and preserve a moment in time. This is the type of photographic series where anyone can look at a photograph and feel and cherish a different emotion within themselves. This photographic series comes from my desire to preserve what the city of Porto still has and always will have to offer.

Silo Auto

by Inês Fonseca

The purpose of this project is to depict a public space of the Metropolitan Area of Porto using photography as the key element of representation. I first started by looking for places that where impactful in the growth of the city, and there was one particular place that sparked interest on my mind. I’d only been to Silo Auto a handful of times and never really paid much attention to it and what it could represent. So on an attempt to find out more about it I made my first fieldtrip there. What came out of this where some photographs of a place that felt half abandoned and half used. This first encounter showed me a lot of different types of approaches that I could take and it made me realize there was a particularity around this space that I never really got from the outside building itself. It quickly became clear that the small details of its interior where what could make this project interesting. I then made a number of other visits to the place where a habit of looking for eerie particularities grew on me. This massive, cold building became a mystery and science fiction playground on my mind, and each time I’d visit I found something new to fill in the pieces. By simply looking at this images, without context, you wouldn’t be able to tell that they were taken in the middle of a city full of life and livelihood, rather they show a dark and mysterious story that intrigues the wondering minds. What started has an attempt to capture and frame the building of Silo Auto in the Metropolitan Area of Porto, became a clear indicator of the power of image and its connection to storytelling. To me these images represent a dystopian reality where there is a necessity of creating life through small things and maybe it represents something completely different to each person who comes upon it and that’s also what ́s fascinating about it.