O Álbum — Chmrqs

Child's portrait, the face covered with crumpled foil.

Group photo at a party, every face blanked out in white.

Portrait of a woman, the face covered with crumpled foil.

Oval military portrait, the face blanked out in grey.

Two men at a table in a desert, faces blanked out.

Class photo, every child's face blanked out in white.

Portrait, the face replaced by a texture like water on marble.

A man leaning on a green car, face blanked out.

Portrait of a woman, the face replaced by a starry sky.

A child running into the sea, the print washed out at one corner.

Girl with braids, the face covered in glittering black.

An album is always a place of memories. In it live stories of joy, sadness, dreams, friendships, loves, heartbreaks, hatreds, secrets, truths, lies… stories that reveal (and re-veil) what was, what was not and what might have been. The familiarity of an album unites, identifies, creates inheritance.

Christopher Marques starts from his family photographic archive to build a narrative. An archive rich in images that bear witness to the socio-economic context of 1960s Portugal: emigration. Christopher sees his story divided between two poles: France, where he was born, and Portugal, the place of his origins, where he was later "forced" to live on his family's return. It is in this duality that he will have to build his home (identity), a home that wanders between the roots he built and those he inherited.

O Álbum arises as a response to this fragmentation of the past, and as an attempt to establish a link with memory. Contact with these images triggered in Marques the need to reconstruct his own identity. An identity built through situations, places and characters, and taken apart by the erasure of faces. What emerges is an album without faces, with a universal face (a non-face), mostly white, which is metaphorically the place of emptiness where a new story can be printed.

This act, almost a break with the familiarity of the faces, shows the need to erase certain memories (or at least these images). These faces will always be part of the author's memory (even if there is an attempt to forget), of his story, but they are no longer individualised.

Moving away from this genetic or resembling side creates a face. A face that is a narrative discovered and chosen by the author himself; perhaps these non-faces are also self-portraits of Christopher Marques. The de-characterisation of the genesis, the white — that degree zero and place of origin — makes the viewer part of O Álbum. We become participants before a white that turns into a mirror; we also see our own story, our own memories reflected. We all share common moments — family.

— Text by Nádia Rodrigues Ribeiro

Final project, BA in Photography, 2012. Text by Nádia Rodrigues Ribeiro.