- Title: Portobello
- Author: Patrícia Almeida
- Collaborations: Texts by Ian Jeffrey, David-Alexandre Guéniot (English, Portuguese)
- Publisher: GHOST
- Dimensions: 22X17,6 cm 8,66X6,93 in
- Number of Pages: 104 pages
- Edition: 1000 copies
- Publishing Date: 2009 (July)
- Place: Lisbon, Portugal
- Dep. Legal / ISBN: n.a.; 978-989-20-1461-6
- Media: Offset, colour.
- Synopsis: "Already thinking of a travel article, I noted the features of this silent world: the memory- erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system; the almost Africanized aspect, but a North Africa invented by someone who had never visited the Maghreb, the apparent absence of any social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present. Perhaps this was what a leisure- dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools." Cocaine Nights, J.G.Ballard, Flamingo, 1996. Photography arrests time but can as well capture the action of an already arrested time, i.e. a vacancy, a time immobilized even before it is captured, a dead time. The pictures of Portobello show us bodies in expected and satisfied poses, representations of a low cost popular culture, self-fictions of proletarian glamour. But they also show us places immobilized within town-planning and architectural projects whose expression refers more to the kind of organization and arrangement of a Luna park than to the construction of places to inhabit. Places to enjoy rather than places to live in. (text provided by the editors David-Alexandre Guéniot and Patrícia Almeida)
- Author's Website:http://patriciaalmeida.com/
- Publisher's Website:http://www.ghost.pt/Portobello.htm
- Notes and Collections: This edition is available at the School of Fine Arts and Design of Caldas da Rainha, Portugal.