BROKEN GROUND
BY ANA CATARINA PINHO
Ana Catarina Pinho studied Visual Arts in Oporto Superior Art School, in 2007, and finished her Master degree in Documentary photography, in 2010. Since then has been participating in art residencies and international projects such as Picture Berlin’10, Nomadic’1012, European Borderlines. Received collaborative grants from European Cultural Foundation and Roberto Cimetta Fund.
Founder, editor and project coordinator of Archivo Photography, she is currently working as a freelance photographer and Documentary Photography lecturer in Polytechnic Institute of Porto, based in Portugal.
Ana Catarina Pinho is represented in several exhibitions and her projects are in print on a number of different publications. Her documentary work is mostly characterised by an artistic strategy where we can feel the influences of significant authors as Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore and also of more recent and contemporary photographers as Alec Soth.
The work of this promising emergent photographer combines a documentary and artistic approach, relating diverse people with the landscape and places where they live or work. Several significant projects could be mentioned as for example Symbolic Landscape, Nomads and Broken Ground, all of which are powerful series where the fictional reinforces the documentary.
In Broken Ground we perceive the concern of Ana Catarina Pinho for unveiling certain contemporary social issues and contradictions, relating them with architecture and urban space, making people with their expectations and emotions the center of interest and the core of this series. It is interesting that the author merges the images of diverse suburban areas belonging to Portugal and Turkey creating a fictional place that calls the attention for the similarities of situations and people between different cultures, showing at the same time the psychological and spatial border that divide people and spaces in many of our contemporary territories.
In the last two years, Ana Catarina Pinho has been working on a new project concerning aspects of the social and political state of Portugal, since it became a country under a severe financial crisis. In this work in progress, the photographer focuses on the everyday aspects of the personal, social and landscape, relating it to previous tension moments in the country's history, trying to approach this theme as a way of reflecting on a possible preview and memory of times to come.
Pedro Leão Neto