Carlos Lobo | Joo Leal Sem ttulo=Untitled

They were lovely, your eyes, but you didn't know where to look. (George
Seferis)

The eyes, which are called the window of the soul, are the main way through which the centre of the senses or common sense can gaze more widely at the endless and wonderful works of Nature; the ears are the second sense which is exalted by listening to the account of the things that the eyes have seen.
(Leonardo da Vinci)

To see is like looking, the perfect natural combination of the five senses; however, in seeing, this same harmony is one of reflected wisdom. Therefore, to look first precedes seeing and then follows it whereas seeing first follows looking and then immediately precedes it.
(Almada Negreiros)

To Look, To See & The Image: It is a question of looking, of knowing to look in order to see, to perceive. The look will be, par excellence, this immanent seeing; it will mean the Light, postulating Knowledge. The question is knowing where to look. Because there is a necessary diversity of ways of looking: the look of the other (Jean-Paul Sartre), the look of the traveller (Srgio Cardoso), the look of the stroller (Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin), the look of the wanderer(Herman Hesse), the look of the stranger (Nelson Brissac Peixoto), the look that leads nowhere (Rainer Marie Rilke), the errant look (Bruce Chatwin), the look of the soul, the symbolic look, the mythical look, the unseeing look, the reflected look, the look of the utopian, the hermetic look and even the look of the serpent - safeguarding, however, the difference in the epistemological order manifest in this incomplete catalogue. The completeness of so many looks contends for the gestation, the widest known diversity of images: hypnagogic and hypnamorphic, hypnic images, hallucinatory images, images by perceptive isolation, rhythmic stimulation images, consecutive images, eidetic images We should also note: memory images, evocative images, imagined images, mental images (Michel Zraffa). Thus, it is possible to form, with clarity, some phantasmic aesthetic portion versus right authorial deliberation: Images of a scene from personal life; Conceptual images of an object; Images//historical event; Images//more general evocation (e.g. of a concept), amongst others susceptible of photographic and videographic production. We should remember, without passing

judgment, the (in)conclusive distinction between the fixed and moving image. The referential and/or elaborative functions also add to richness and complexity with a view to the never-exhaustive theorisation on the image and its typologies operationalities and realisations. True, neither the anatomic-physiological nor the purely psychophysiological look are sufficient, however convenient; to look is reason and body. Both the visible and the invisible. The condition of being visible, a right and a duty of Nature toward Man, requires man to exist; the invisible, let us state like Merleau-Ponty, requires the condition of becoming, not simply the invisible being the non-visible: "...what has been
or will be seen and is not, or is seen by someone other than me (but not by me), but where its absence counts in the world (it is "behind" the visible, imminent or eminent visibility, it is Urpraesentiert exactly like Nichturprsentiertbar, like another dimension) where the gap that marks its place is a point of passage in the "world". (Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible , Paris, Gallimard, 1964)

Conclusion:
To To To To see: see: see: see: to to to to look look look look at at at at things >>> to see things; others >>> to see others; the world >>> to see in the world; oneself >>> TO SEE oneself.

Landscape, Architecture & Objects: There is a prime common denominator between the landscape, architecture and objects among so many others to be mentioned that is, precisely, intentionality. Intentionality is the inseparable theme; it is the integral condition of the subject that decided to capture something (etwas) for the photograph. The intentionality underlying the photographic decision carries analogies with the intentionality that guides any act of volition in favour of production. The distinction will lie in what is designated as fragmentary intentionality that possesses an aesthetic effectiveness. Even though we always find, in other types of images, externalised through different registers, a decision directed at the capture of a fragment of the visible, in photography it reveals itself genuinely constitutive, substantial and final.
These are fragments of impulsive or compulsive, or more simply pulsive, spontaneous, images, of a second or two, through which time precedes itself in the invisible. (Pascal Quignard, Sur le Jadis, Paris, Gallimard, 2002)

The attention devoted to reality transforms both allusive representations and tight presentifications, in fragments of a scrupulous or removed documentation (always having the function of representing/presenting a picture or creating detachment). The decision about the affirmative fragment can derive from essential and dissimilar residues.
In a first moment, it derives from visual perception.

In a second moment, it reincarnates the mental ability to elaborate from this same visual perception, approaching it, moving away from it, protecting it, distorting it and finally making use of it as a unity and a whole. In a third moment, the previous options are recognised as we discover that they are mirrored in the procedures required for its realisation.

The sanctioned object, the fruit of the seen and the looked, reconciles itself in the individual, converging towards knowledge, perhaps differing in the moment when either action occurs in the individual/subject who experiences it. The photographic product implies therefore endless and interacting elements, with particular relevance to some binomials assumed by the subject/author directed at the subject/viewer (the public): Continuity versus discontinuity in the justified elements; Technical specialisation versus iconographic specificity; Presentification versus gnoseologic interpretation; Isolation versus convergence of visual signs and/or objects; Construction versus (aggregated) conceptual destruction; Technological accuracy versus creative intuition The authors intentionality estimates the distinction, the almost unique conditions that one wishes to expand. The factors governing the decision on the identitarian fragment of the photographic image explain through multiple strategies the desired iconographic and/or iconological solutions: they promote tendencies, affinities and invoke referentiations or contexts. The distinctive, the differentiable, ensure a certain detachment from the world even though they can never remove themselves from it for it is unquestionable and constitutive. On the other hand, they guarantee its availability for the decision to ignore, transfigure or recount it to be made
In this world, things are simultaneously available for use and according to their manifestation. () It is what does not show itself but gathers in itself, the strength mustered before or beyond forms, but not as another obscure form: as the other of forms. (Jean-Luc Nancy, Au fond des images, Paris, Galile, 2003)

Thought intervenes in the destined image. It confers on it adjacent charges, aesthetic properties and added values: realising, imagining dominance; visible or unveiling resulting intimacies that have a common conscience in the public that perceives them. This does not dissolve the ability to justify objectiveness if that is the instance preferred. Photographic images and other external images can be falsifications of the eye. We grant them this right. Even though it should be noted that seeing, looking, may be directed by passion, by emotion, these are associated, become accomplices in a reflexive exercise that bestows density and truth on them (as autonomous and discriminated images).

The deformation granted them by fragmentary (and ontic) intentionality does not cancel the imagetic accuracy or clarity: this is another order, the phenomenological order, because it is aesthetic, although we can question identification, recognition or agreement with stricter cognitive topics: I do not understand what I saw. And I do not even know whether I saw it
for my eyes ended up by not being different from the seen thing. (Clarice Lispector, A Paixo segundo G.H., Lisboa, Relgio dgua, 2000)

Landscape: Landscape began by being defined since the remotest times of Art historiography, dating back to Greece and Rome, and progressing from then on with invalidations, interstices and dominances. It reigned or abdicated, gliding on with the rules of taste or with ontological reasons, and claimed reinvigorated appropriations as photography took it on. Landscape is alive in the 21st Century. If landscape is an interpretative art, when it is photographed is it doubly so? Landscape occupies a territory; it is localised and represents a portion of reality that can be apprehended. As territory, landscape is conventionally defined, referring to the delimitation of a surface through natural or cultural contours that are decision objects. The lines that govern these contours are baroque and extend an almost paradoxical meaning because the fixing of limits interacts with the open sinuosity of curvatures and bordering nearlabyrinths. Localisation is demonstrated by resorting to the definition of reference axes; it is established by administrative procedures; it is fixed in plans and maps that are filled in by partial images, taken from diverse angles and perspectives, all complementary and necessary Back to Zero.

The portion of reality in question results from two previous topics and is decided by the intentionalised will of those who address and desire it. It is the singular place, the endless sum of places that gain iconographic identity and aesthetic autonomy. A supposed aesthetic of the place: as a portion, as a fragment. Fragments combine isolated components of reality meant for discernment, becoming visual worlds touched by personal fabrication. Apparently the opposite corresponds to the definition of panorama. Panorama is a continuous narrative of the painted scene or landscape, conforming to a flat or curved surface that unfolds or enfolds the viewer:
But your eyes proclaim/ That all is surface. Surface is what is there/And nothing can exist except what is there. (John Ashbery, Auto-retrato num espelho convexo e outros poemas, Lisboa, Relgio dgua, 1995)

It is a fluid surface, in the horizontality that the infinite perhaps earns from us. It conforms to a linearity that oscillates between parallel lines and/or lines that tend to converge to a virtual and distant vanishing point. They can be ascending or descending, being transported to positive or negative, hence bipolar, mythologies. However, they presuppose an almost pictorial as much as geometric levelling Endless.

Poetically, they would be bands of views nurtured by visual perception that wants to bestow longevity and matter on them. They are filled in by natural or environmental, visceral or constructed substances. Architecture(s) & Objects: The imaginary sets Imaginary film sets - for some film productions stipulate directed gazes that want to see and focus on specific factors, on structures designated by a deliberately captured visuality.

Architecture always has an exterior and an interior, as the human body. which is inside and outside, being one. On the other hand, architectures have a history. They belong to generations that perpetuate them thanks to their functionality and inhabitability or dissolve them by damage and neglect. They are the symbolic empty houses that are not necessarily homes They are embodied structures that can be filled in with unsuspected products and materials. Tarmac roads, urban layouts, lead to the seeds of architecture, they legitimise them and make access to them possible. Roads are lines, all things are lines as lvaro de Campos knew that all things are symbols or maybe nothing. Symbols can be neglected objects, can be intentional debris or obstacles whose attributes deflagrate in social and ideological connotations. These objectual traces are signs, allegories or metaphors according to their use, to the pragmatics decided for them. In these spaces where the architectural function is predominant, human tracks almost dissolve, so imperceptible are they. It is almost as if they had not existed In Imaginary film sets photographic images appear in a post-conceptual time/space (by reference to German photographic tradition), regenerating aesthetical values and adding different semantic dimensions to them. Similarly to what happens with the landscape, there are proximity and detachment factors that organise differentiated visual perceptions (and the others). The architectural sets shown in the images are a construction of a construction: a double or triple conceptualisation since their matricity comes as a sequence of the line (the drawing as matrix) and returns to

the stipulation of lines, contours, chromatic fill-ins substantive morphologies bi-dimensionalised in the photographs. Photography consists of, has this identitarian and essential note that is recognised in drawing when this is assumed as a requirement and postulation of the authors body: Where we see that drawing is a physical
process./ Because we only begin to understand it when we have practised it a lot./()/ I discovered that drawing was not only to look at, but also to touch. (Jan Fabre, Umbraculum, Paris, Actes du Sud, 2001)

Maybe Images are words that failed us.

(Manoel de Barros, Retrato Quase Apagado em que se Pode Ver Perfeitamente Nada)

Maria de Ftima Lambert (Coordinator Teacher, Curator and Critic)