Neal Slavin has a passion: Portugal.
He has dedicated a film to it.
Here’s how he presents it:
The photographs above are a fifty year love affair with the Portuguese people. It begins in 1968 when I lived in Lisbon, the city of light, caught in the shadows of the Fascist dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, friend to few and enemy to the masses. He ruled Portugal for an astonishing forty-four years; I arrived in its 38th year. While living there, Salazar would be replaced by Marcelo Caetano who ran the country for another six years before being ousted during the Carnation Revolution. I immediately fell in love with the Portuguese people whose courage and resilience helped them to endure life under the thumb of Fascism. These qualities would eventually carry them to victory.
At the time, I was one of the first three to receive a Fulbright Fellowship in Photography : the other two were Mary Ellen Mark (Turkey) and George Krause ( Spain) and one of only a few ever allowed to photograph in Salazar’s Portugal.
What I found was a country in a state of profound sadness, going through a dark tunnel with no visible ray of hope at the end. At first, my photographs were dull and lacked the honesty necessary to show a true picture of the nation. Saudade, the apparent source of their ability to withstand the horrors of authoritarian rule kept them confident and strong. It is in the DNA of the Portuguese people which some have described as a poetic melancholia, a nostalgia and longing for the past when things were better. In finding Saudade I feel I discovered the soul of the Portuguese people. I was determined to create an unvarnished portrait of the Portuguese people during this time, while faraway two colonial wars raged in Mozambique and Angola.
I returned to Portugal in 2016 to take new photographs and make a film about the people I had fallen in love with fifty years earlier. How do you make an honest film about the soul of a people embedded in Saudade, that feeling that no one can fully explain? More importantly, how would I continue photographing the people and their relationship to Saudade in the 21st Century? This time I had the good fortune to collaborate and work with incredibly creative Portuguese artists who joined me on this journey. It was during this experience that I found the answer in Fado, the expressionistic, soulful music created four centuries earlier that continues to play over and over in every Portuguese person’s head. I realized that even now, it is the Fadista’s voice that carries the message of Saudade which remains intact today as it did fifty years ago when I lived there.
A book and documentary film SAUDADE A Love Letter to Portugal (portrait of an artist in search of a soul) will be released later this year.
Neal Slavin will be giving a special talk free to the public about the work on March 14 at 7pm
National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York, NY 10003
RSVP https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-neal-slavin-tickets-539499526607?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
