In the small, elegant photo book, Daily Pilgrims,
city dwellers are portrayed as blurry, anonymous ephemeral phantoms photographed
against backdrops of sparkling cityscapes of towering steel and glass
and multicolored glowing lights.
To make this series, Portuguese photographer Virgilio Ferreira
traveled and photographed in six Asian cities in 2006: Bangkok, Macao,
Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo. In all of them, territory and
behavior are changing fast, and the cities’ inhabitants often seem
insignificant and furtive in comparison to the urban structures that surround
them.
Ferreira says this about his work:
“In an intuitive and random way, as I walk through
the streets I let myself be attracted by lights, colors, scenes, and anonymous
people who cross my way and whom I invite to pose. The portraits are made
very quickly, but, in a rigorous and selective approach, I try to relate
the person and the background. As focus and lack of focus create tension,
the unfocused faces turn into fleeting masks."
The "information deficit" caused by the unusual focus technique imbues the atmosphere of all these photos with cool emotion and ambiguity.
This book was published for the Daily Pilgrims exhibition
at the Portuguese Centre of Photography, Cadelia da Relacao, Portugal,
May 2008.
— Jim Casper
Daily Pilgrims
by Virgilio Ferreira
Self-published
68 color pages
Texts in Portuguese and English
ISBN: 978-972-99756-2-2
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