PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography is not Paula Marcondes’ central practice.
In every photograph, the camera remains unseen. No one looks directly into the lens. Nothing is beautiful or perfect. The work looks for what is present but goes unnoticed. The hope is simple: that someone who looks at these photographs starts to notice something they had not seen before, or sees something familiar differently.
Photographer Ed Ruscha said “Photography’s just a playground for me. I’m not a photographer at all.” To Paula, the camera is one instrument among many: to capture ideas, moments, and observations that speak to her research on consciousness, connection and healing, before transforming them into other forms.
Robert Rauschenberg, another influence on Paula’s work, described photography as heightening his “desire to look” and as “fertilizer to promote growth and change in any artistic project.” He folded his own photographs into his Combines, silkscreens, and collages: fragments reappearing at different scales, reversed, layered. The photograph as material, not as endpoint.
Paula works in the same spirit. A photograph made in Greenland reappears in a Kitsch Glitz installation. Videos made in Montana become the origin of the Amplify series.
Arctic Trails (Greenland, 2019) documents what exists at the margins of one of the world’s most remote landscapes: the traces of human presence that coexist with untouched nature.
Williamsburg Sessions (New York, 2019) documents a neighbourhood in transformation: factories reimagined, old structures finding new lives. The camera as witness to what is in the process of becoming something else.
Singapore Overexposed (Singapore, 2019/2021) presents ordinary scenes of daily life in negative. The shadows were always present. The pandemic made them visible.
Her photographs stand on their own as individual works, and they also inform everything that follows.
The camera and the cell phone are the portable studio. Where a physical atelier cannot travel, they can.
Arctic Trails, 2019
Greenland, 2019.
Paula expected untouched landscape. She saw oil tanks alongside fjords. She saw an orca whale served whole to the sled dogs, shotguns sold at the village store next to bubble gum. A way of life that has sustained Arctic communities for thousands of years: nothing wasted, everything in relationship with nature.
She saw an abandoned American base from the Second World War, left standing in a remote fjord. The Americans travelling in her group saw garbage. She saw the sacrifice of men who had spent years in that isolated place, far from everything they knew. The base no longer exists. It was demolished the following year.
What society discarded, the photographs preserve. Every place, like every person, is shadow and light.
The camera remained unseen. No one looks directly into the lens. Nothing is beautiful or perfect. Only what was actually there.
Williamsburg Sessions, 2019
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 2019.
A neighbourhood in transformation: factories reimagined, piers reclaimed, old structures finding new lives. The chimney that once belonged to a factory now rises from a park. The sugar refinery has become something else entirely. Three bridges in the distance, the river between them.
Beautiful and imperfect. Everything is in the process of becoming something else. Every place, like every person, is shadow and light.
The camera remained unseen. No one looks directly into the lens. Nothing is beautiful or perfect. Everything is in the process of becoming something else.
Singapore Overexposed, 2019-2021
Singapore, 2019-2021.
Ordinary scenes of daily life: a clothes rack drying in the sun, staircases in Tiong Bahru, umbrellas at a gate, women in Chinatown, the HDB estates where most Singaporeans actually live. Nothing dramatic. Nothing staged.
And then, the pandemic. The world was forced to see what had always been there. Paula returned to these images and presented them in negative: not to show what was lost, but to show what had been invisible. The shadows were always present. The pandemic made them visible.
Every place, like every person, is shadow and light.
The camera remained unseen. No one looks directly into the lens. Nothing is beautiful or perfect. Only what existed before the world changed.
