Público, 15/09/02
Photos of the Unforgettable.
To the generation that has only heard of wars and to those who have been
part of them, none has been as scary than the one started in September
of last year.
The falling of the Twin Towers was the attack of a ghost that later got
a name, a body, and hatred. A war that started on TV, in direct, watched
in silence.
Rita Barros, a photographer living in New York was a witness and shows
her feelings in Centro Português de Fotografia until Nov 16. Images
in black and white of moments of pure hell, surprise, and incomprehension.
Images of her fear while the buildings fell at her feet transforming themselves
in pieces of history. The eyes, the camera got stuck in this whirlwind
of fear in the faces of the New Yorkers. More than keeping the information,
these photos keep all our incomprehension.
Like Maria do Carmo Serén from CPF wrote "the photos of Rita
Barros bring us back to hell, a year later. Because they bring the signifier
to the significant, what it is and what it represents, the memory and
the emptiness, the removal of the debris, the gratuitousness of a life
that will not return – the shop windows destroyed, the controlled
panic, the masks, and the empty space where still today the lights show
memory and faith.
By Joana Delgado Macel.
Visão 15/9/02
A Year Later….
…A Year Later, Rita Barros, remembers the terror lived in the
streets of Manhattan between cries of despair and anguish. The exhibition
of black and white images recuperates the possible feelings of being confronted
with such a tragic event. But this is not an exhibition of another reportage
like so many we have seen through the year, but a symbolic reading of
something not forgotten, and accomplished through a personal contemporary
vision of "fotografia de autor." In fact, Rita Barros "manages
to update the event without shocking those who have not finished their
mourning but will keep a deeper and stronger meaning" adds the Centro
Português de Fotografia….
By Susana Silva Oliveira
Diário de Noticias 12/9/02
To Look at Manhattan a Year Later
A Year Later an exhibition at the CPF includes 24 images that constitute
the symbolic reading of the photographer Rita Barros of those days that
may have changed world history.
… the drama of the actual black and white photos contrasts with
the happy colors with which she portrayed the Chelsea Hotel where she
lives…. And for those who only identify the work of Rita Barros
with that chromatic craziness in which the author registered the kaleidoscopic
ambience of the cult hotel, A Year Later reveals another look.
By Fernando Madail
Expresso 17/8/0
Foto-Horror, 11/9 seen by the eyes of Rita Barros
… what marked deeply the photographer that has shown in galleries
in New York and Lisbon was the "smell, difficult to describe, a mixture
that hurt the nose. She describes her work as a personal vision of a drama
that has forever marked our collective and takes into account the human
side of a city paralyzed." These are moments captured before, during,
and after.
|