Photography has never abandoned its historical relationship with the portrait. The scientific condition in dealing with reality – optically, chemically, mechanically apart – has eliminated error, so says convention, from human interpretation. Portrait, then freed from subjectivity through the (objective) camera’s objective, would crystallize faces to render them into mnemonic objects.

The created image separates two sides: there and here. The portrayed and the viewer, despite the boundary between spaces, face each other in a constant ricochet. They accept, however, some prior rules: that photographer and character have met before in the same time and place.

In «histórias sobre mim» (stories about me), Carla Cabanas revisits some themes that she holds dear: memory and portrait. In that rendezvous with the portrayed person, the camera turns into a recorder capturing the answer to the request “tell a story about me”. The pinhole camera does not use lenses, or mechanical components, nor can it generate images from short fractions of time. In the end, there are no recognizable faces left. It is not a work intended for the lasting memory of the person portrayed, but to explore what remains, in its memory, about the artist. The portrait then turns into a self-portrait: an image that in itself contains neither here nor there.