One year under the lights and about the colors of Leblon
inside, pure absence
no light, no color
where am I?
I breathe, I look
how beautiful!
changeover canvas
what am I going to do?
what can I do?
how much time do I have?
For 365 days I photographed the twilight at Leblon beach, in Rio de Janeiro. Always the same equipment, always calibrated by hand — so that the shift in colour would be the sky's and not the camera's. I gathered more than four thousand images.
Each work is titled with the geographic coordinate of the point where the photograph was taken, followed by the exact date and time. 22°59'15.09" S 43°13'13.379" W 02/01 18:33:34 is not a code: it is the place and the instant, written out in full. Twilight lasts a few minutes and never repeats. The title is what keeps it from becoming generic landscape.
The series is organised in nine cores — Intimacies, Compositions, Waters, Boats, Sky, Sands, Gradient, Two Brothers Hill and Horizons — each following a different insistence within the same cycle.
On 28 May 2019, twenty-one of these photographs returned to the beach in large format, held by art educators along the promenade between Borges de Medeiros and Rita Ludolf streets, at sunset. Passers-by saw the image and the sky at the same time. A book with around 120 photographs was released on 26 July 2019, the centenary of the neighbourhood.
The art critic Valesca Veiga wrote Till the Lights Go Out about this series.
