“Viagem a Itália” is António Júlio Duarte’s first exhibition at Lehmann Gallery.

One of the most relevant contemporary Portuguese photographers, António Júlio Duarte was born in 1965 in Lisbon, where he lives and works as a photographer and photography professor.

Between 1985 and 1989, he studied Photography at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual in Lisbon, and in 1991 at the Royal College of Art in London, as a fellow of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

He has exhibited regularly in Portugal and abroad since 1990, and his work is represented in various public and private collections, both nationally and internationally.

He has published several photobooks, notably Guiné-Bissau 1990 (2023), Against the Day (2019), Ensaio (2018), Japan Drug (2014), and White Noise (2011), published by Pierre von Kleist Editions; Ph. António Júlio Duarte (Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2022); W (Antumbra Publishing House, 2021); Deviation of the Sun (Centro Cultural Vila Flor, 2013), and The Candidate (GHOST Editions, 2012). White Noise was named one of the best photobooks of 2011 by several international art critics.

“The six photographs in Viagem a Itália present themselves as zones of suspension, where history and experience occupy the same plane. They are images born of the artist’s presence in a place, yet they seek to represent no place at all. We are not presented with monuments; these photographs are, in their inevitable twodimensionality, anti-monuments, emptying the classical heritage both physically and figuratively, exposing its unstable condition. (…)

As so often in António Júlio Duarte’s work, these images speak less about the world they appear to represent than about the act of looking itself. The artificiality revealed within them functions not as denunciation but as a key to interpretation. We seek in images a place, a character, an identifiable time — a literal anchor point. Yet photography, much like history, always offers something more uncertain: not what stood before the camera, but what we choose to recognise.”

PEDRO ALFACINHA

Excerpt from the exhibition text