Jose L.R.Fernandes

What really interests me, my true passion is the contact, the extreme proximity, the availability to let me in, to speak to me, to show me how you live, what kinds of things you hang on your bedroom walls, where you make your sausages, how you make your bread. Photographing, in my case, is engaging in a subtle dance with a subject: me, a stranger, intruder, hopping around with a camera, high and low, choosing the magic moment while the subject chooses what he or she wants to give me. It is most of the time, a spontaneous, unspoken contract. Finding that moment requires the involvement of my totality, my interests, emotionality, references and influences.

I was born in Angola, Africa in 1959, an Officer’s son. I spent my early years under the Fascist Dictatorship of Salazar in Portugal before finding myself living in Hammond, Louisiana, thanks to a scholarship to college, at age of 18. Having grown in the monolithic culture of 60’s Portugal, I was always very curious about other cultures, and my photography work is the history of my interaction with persons of those “other” cultures, including my own Portuguese, to which, after almost 40 years away I have also become foreign. I’m like an ambassador of my nation of one, negotiating moments with whomever triggers me to press the button.

Years before I picked up the camera at 30 years of age, I was being introduced to photography by my own accord mainly through magazines, first in fashion, where photographers with strong structural composition, motion, storytelling and dramatic contrast caught my attention. Lillian Bassman’s poetic, romantic drama, Albert Watson ’s dark portraits and Irving Penn’s classicism were early influences.

In the 80’s and 90’s, I was selling furniture door to door in the African American rural areas north of New Orleans, having incredible one on one experiences, but I was not photographing them. Those years gave me the ability to sustain rejection and to get me in the door, qualities that are crucial to my photographic work. In natural progression, I started to look at documentary. Walker Evans became a huge influence by how he got in and documented people’s private spaces in the dust bowl of the 30’s. I often subconsciously try to marry that with Henri Cartier Bresson’s sense of the moment and with William Klein’s notes of fashion, movement, and the use of wide angle lenses to get very close and touch the subject giving the feeling that you’re there.

My early years of photography were in Fashion. It was a torrid love affair fueled by an exaggerated romantic view of that space, influenced by the great photographers’ work I had devoured: Horst, Avedon, Hellen Von Unwerth, Meisel, LaChapelle, Skrebneski, so many… Progressing from building my portfolio into the cold world of actually doing professional work, I gradually became disillusioned and the thrill was gone. 15 years later, as a documentary photographer, I had a chance of diving back into the doldrums of fashion, this time as an outsider with all the freedom in the world, unconstrained by anyone’s ideas, egos, commercial viability, focusing my lens with glee into the inconsistencies, hypocrisy, hurt, devastation but also beauty that years earlier I had felt. That was of great interest to me. It was sort of a mild revenge! I was given unfettered access to photograph the behind-the-scenes of Lisbon Fashion Week sometimes like a fly in the wall, other times like a tiger about to pounce.This resulted in my project “Moda Lisboa” which could be described cynically beautiful, and it always talked about something. To my amazement, I was invited for the following year, and the images ended up at MUDE, Lisbon’s design and fashion museum.

In 2004, after 8 years of inactivity following my divorce from fashion photography, itching to come back, I begun experimenting with photography again, a little bit lost, not knowing what I was going to do, dabbling in portraits, street photography, relearning the medium. One year later I found myself in a whirlwind, ridding one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes on American soil, Hurricane Katrina, in 2005 out of my New Orleans home. In the next three days, with my very basic, early digital camera in hand, my wife and I went around surveying the neighborhood threading through filthy knee high water, meeting people, photographing, oblivious to the real extent of the damage. It wasn’t until we arrived in Houston 4 days after the storm, in the hotel room, in front of the tv, that we realized—Oh god, our life has irreversibly changed! I didn’t have a chance of looking at the work until a couple of weeks later as we returned to Portugal and realized that the work was being extremely well received in Europe. The process of going around and photographing people was so similar to when I was selling furniture door to door, the human contact, second nature to me and a lot of fun. I was hooked. I spent 6 years in Portugal doing commercial work, portraits and advertising to make a living, but I had the bug and started to spend a lot of time on the streets photographing in Europe, Cuba, Turkey, Morocco and coming back to New Orleans every year for a couple of weeks to photograph. It was at this time that I begun to see my work as projects, collections, as Operae. It was a work of love, unpaid, having no idea what would be the future of this work.

Except for the 6 years after hurricane Katrina when I was in Portugal, I’ve lived my life in New Orleans where I built my name as a fine art documentary photographer, having published in numerous international magazines, collaborated in several books, exhibited in galleries and museums. In documenting the life of my adopted city, there is no event more powerful for me to capture and witness in the Black community of New Orleans, my wife’s culture, than when people come together to celebrate the life of one their own upon death. Sending that soul to the place of eternal rest with dignity is deeply ingrained in the psyche of Black New Orleanians going back to the days of slavery. Uncle Lionel Batiste spent decades as the drummer for the Treme Brass Band, playing at funerals, annual parades, often pro bono, mentoring the young, showing up for his community, being the impeccably dressed dandy at all times, and he was extremely loved. I had no way to know that “Uncle Lionel’s Funeral” in 2012, was happening at a time of a gelling of so many changes that came to everyone in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina but that disproportionally impacted the black community, putting the survival of the culture at risk. , This became one of my greatest works. I wanted to capture it and show it to the world in all it’s glory as Josef Koudelka had inspired me with the immense humanity that pours out of his photographs of Gypsies, a fringe, nomad nation floating in Europe that intrigued me very much since early on, they were the only contact I had with a disparate culture as Gypsies would come around our house selling fabric and shoes door to door.

A continuing theme through out my work is documenting facets of my own culture, I was very attracted to the idea of visiting and photographing Fatima, a pilgrimage destination for millions of people from around the world. I’ve always been mesmerized, even surprised by the intensity of faith that I’ve observed in present day Portugal. As a budding photographer in the 90’s, I was not immune to the artistry and sense of global responsibility of Sebastião Salgado who dedicated a decade to each of his humanity scale projects. His epic compositions and dramatic capturing of available light come to serve images of nature and humanity on the edge of survival. In “Fatima” I had this completely open area of worship giving me the possibility of documenting on one hand, faith in its purest form—individual belief and submission to the abstract notion of divine power, and on the other, showing the face and brand of organized religion—a stealth and powerful structure which for centuries was allied to the monarchy and in the 20th century to the fascist dictatorship.

It was in a tiny video store in New Orleans, Video Alternatives, in the 80’s and 90’s that I found, the most profound of my influences. There, before the age of streaming, I had access to a vast collection of socially bitting cinema from outside the nucleus of Western Europe: Poland, Russia, China, Iran, Mexico, Argentina among many. One of the aspects that sparked my interest was the depiction of the Exceptional in the banality of the toil of life in these remote cultures. Foreign cinema did it for me, especially when real inhabitants are used as actors nearly blending genres of fiction and documentary as in Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s “Time of the Gypsies” or in Iranian Hadjid Hadjidi”s Children of Heaven.

There are aspects of all of these influences seen within my work. The result is hopefully beautiful, as by nature I strive to interweave esthetics with content, and the photograph is a memorable record of a moment that intersects the appearance and agency of the subject with me as a whole person. So, in a way, what you see in the photograph is also me. I cannot hide, knowing perfectly that as an observer, I will always affect the observed. In those moments, they’re not solely them, they’re us. The photograph is just a receipt for the interaction.