Rio — Uma geografia sentimental

In this project, João Henriques visually explored the territory where he was born, and also his closest family, between the source and the mouth of the Nabão River, in the region between Ansião and Tomar.

The use of water as a thematic support and the family's connections to the territory evoke a "sentimental geography," a term that, however, seeks to transcend visual sentimentality, instead embodying something that can be simultaneously objective and subjective, personal and collective, referring to seeing and feeling, and to what is on the surface, but also in the depths.

Perhaps, a visual interplay between figure and ground: up to a certain point, the river was a central figure in regional development, through the economy of the paper and spinning mills that were established along it; currently, having lost this prominence, the river appears as a backdrop to other figures, forms, and narratives. If photographic identity is already recognized as something ambiguous, somewhere between art and document, photography as a representation of landscape seems to intensify this characteristic by introducing phenomenological and territorial questions, through the interrogation of the meaning of place through the image, or of landscape as a way of seeing, or even, in an ecological sense, by blurring the invisible barrier between human consciousness and the natural world.

The first excuse I used to skip classes was the Nabão River. It was June, I was in sixth grade, the heat and the boring subject of Manual Arts insistently demanded other adventures and more refreshing waters. Thirty years later I returned to the river, and to study, the physical immersion now replaced by the visual, in a territory along which I and my parents were born, a place perhaps familiar, but paradoxically unknown. This work formed part of my Master's thesis in Photography at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar.