STREET PHOTOGRAPHY
Under a burning
sun
Vasco Trancoso captures the colour, contrast and geometry of the streets where he lives in his stunning book 99. Damien Demolder finds out more
J
ust a few minutes on Google Street View reveals that Vasco Trancoso’s home town is a pretty exciting place for a street photographer. The hard, direct and piercing Portuguese sun creates deep, sharp-edged shadows in the narrow streets. And every now and then those dense blankets of shade are slashed open by bright blades of golden light that streak across the pavements to play on the faces of the vibrant buildings. Contrasts of highlights and shade mix with conflicting colours, textures
of wall tiles and flaking paint, and bejewelled by the shapes of natives going about their daily life against a backdrop of solid architectural lines. You can see this too in Vasco’s new book, 99 – a visual exploration of the compositional potential of a town called Caldas da Rainha. Unlike a lot of photographers who claim to be documenting the life or people of a place, Vasco is happy to admit he is rather more interested in creating visually stimulating pictures. ‘Above all,’ he says, ‘my work is an interpretation of the reality. I don’t try to describe places I shoot faithfully, but rather to fictionalise the reality to discover myself.’ I like this idea as it frees us to shoot what pleases us instead of having to think the whole time about whether the picture is a useful part of some deeper story. We don’t have to engage in worrying about issues, the truth or the viewer very much at all, and working this way liberates the photographer to concentrate on style. We can take things the way they present themselves to us – which is a nicely laid-back way of working. We are always being told we need to embed ourselves, to get to the bottom of the story, but here’s Vasco telling us he takes life as it comes and at face value. www.amateurphotographer.co.uk
