Paulo Nozolino: «We go through the world like a shadow»

In the First Person

João Pacheco

Name: Paulo Nozolino. Profession: photographer. We can start with this simple bio. Guided by the interview below, we can then enter the ‘lab’ of this nomadic photographer, who crosses borders and is radically averse to serene places and their tranquil images.

At a certain point in this interview, Paulo Nozolino says, ‘I started looking at the ground instead of the sky. I started looking at what people throw away, instead of what architects build.’ This orientation of the gaze described by the photographer has both an aesthetic and an ethical meaning. There is a rigorous interplay between these two dimensions in his photographs, which he embraces as a duty in the face of the sterilisation of images and the anaesthetic proliferation that is offered nowadays in the form of relentlessly banal spectacle. This gaze directed to immanence and the abysses of opacity is confronted by radical alterity: ruins, waste, destruction, death. In a word, evil. It is from this that their violence stems, and their obsessive representation of the debris and tragedies of history. Auschwitz and Sarajevo are extreme places beyond redemption, devoid of sky or horizon, with a ground strewn with corpses. It is here that Paulo Nozolino saw an allegory of history and its horrors. The ruins of the world, bodies that are just torsos: everywhere he looks, Nozolino sees catastrophe in action.

On the other hand – or maybe not – the chiaroscuro in many of his photographs reminds us of the Baroque and its painting. Paulo Nozolino positions himself at the intersection of art and time. He is the photographer of tragic consciousness, forcing the spectator to face the netherworld and decipher the morbid hieroglyphs of precariousness, violence and death.

António Guerreiro

On the work desk, the recorder is switched on, as is the mobile phone.

Sitting at the drafting table overlooking Lisbon, the photographer Paulo Nozolino is not looking at the city. He is focused on the rapidly changing digits on the dials of the two devices recording our conversation.

From this height, the view encompasses almost fifty years of work and the life and worldview of one of the most internationally acclaimed Portuguese artists of our time. And what remains of us, what we have lived, what we have seen.

PAULO NOZOLINO It’s torture to see time pass.

JOÃO PACHECO Yes. But these times will disappear; the screen will darken and we’ll no longer notice time passing..

PN I have to stop looking, it’s the only way.

JP Have you pressed a camera shutter today?

PN No.

JP When was the last time you did?

PN Three days ago in Arles. Sometimes I press the shutter for the sake of it, for no particular reason. Other times, I have a reason.

JP How long can you go without pressing it?

PN I can leave a film in the camera for six months.

JP Doesn’t that make you anxious?

PN Not at all. I used to feel anxious when I used a lot of film, because I didn’t know what I was doing. Nowadays I have the luxury of time, of not working under pressure.

JP When was it that you didn’t know what you were doing?

PN At the beginning. You don’t know what you’re doing for the first ten years.

JP Did it start in 1972?

PN Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time.

JP What were you painting before?

PN Dreadful stuff. I destroyed it all.

JP Everything? Did you get bad grades?

PN No, I didn’t like it. It was complicated. I fear and admire painting immensely, but it’s a complicated business. It forces you to close yourself off. And I didn’t want to do that.

JP But there’s at least a reproduction of a painting on your wall.

PN A self-portrait by Lucian Freud, hidden away. Apart from that, I don’t think there’s anything else.

JP There’s also a postcard with Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World. Did you study painting because of family expectations?

PN No. I love the art of painting. I’ve always loved it.

JP What motivated you to move to London to study photography?

PN A deep desire to get out of this damned country.

JP It was damned because we were living in a dictatorship. Or do you mean ‘damned country’ in general?

PN I mean at the time. I don’t know if it’s still damned for other reasons.

JP How was the move to London? Did your family support you?

PN I had my family’s backing. It was difficult to leave the country then. You needed money, you needed to have done every photography course in Portugal before they would authorise you to leave the country for further study. And that’s what I did.

JP Had you completed your military service?

PN No. That’s why. So, my military service was postponed and I was allowed to go abroad. Eventually I was forced to come back for recruiting. Luckily, I didn’t pass.

JP Was this at the height of the war?

PN No, it was in 1978. I turned up, but I wasn’t accepted.

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