1755 is a detailed ethnographic/anthropologic portrait of the place and culture of Lisbon during a certain epoch via a wash of associative photographic documentation released as symbolic and collective memory.

It’s meant as a micro/macro hyper-mapping of the Lisbon area, whose summation of details, create a unique DNA cultural fingerprint of a certain place and time, as experienced through the viewpoint of its author, and understood via the shared experience of the people who live here. An exhaustive multitude of Lisbon, whether in living or material forms, are represented, resulting in a true and beautiful image bouquet of Lisbon and its collective soul.

The use of the project title “1755" is due to the history-defining earthquake of November 1, 1755, which decimated the city of Lisbon. As a child and adult, you constantly hear about this event and date, whether among Portuguese people, or everyday overhearing tour guides on the streets. You can’t help but associate what you see and feel without cross-referencing the earthquake’s effect on present-day Lisbon. It's a mythological number that almost everyone instantly understands and associates with Lisbon. As, the photographs grew and grew for this project, it started to feel, more and more, like an earthquake of images of Lisbon, which eventually lead me to the metaphoric title of this project.

1755 is grand summation of Lisbon via the consideration of any and all details that a person living here would notice consciously, or subconsciously every day walking about. Residents have spent years of their lives walking through the city of Lisbon. Sometimes we remember big details and forget small ones. Sometimes the opposite is true. Memory and saudade are an important component of how we remember a time, place and culture.

If I were to ask you to recall your past ten years of living in Lisbon, or wherever you call home, and asked you to write down maybe 100 visual memories in your head. What emotional experiences would you go through? Could you recount 500 or 1,000 images from memory alone? I want to show a flood of memory that identifies a place and culture, uniquely via 1755 images, from the smallest detail to the biggest.

I was partially influenced by Fernando Pessoa and his poetic visual descriptions of the smallest miracles and moods of living in Lisbon... especially the Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), which is literally hundreds of shuffled memories of Lisbon existence, described randomly in highly poetic and visual detail.

1755 is a maze to get lost in; overwhelmed and calmed by a wash of memory and time.


This is phase one of the project, which will expand, in the near-future, with various video, audio, and physical branches.