Nevoeiro

by Catarina de Oliveira Simão

“In Portugal, a living riddle predicts the return of a long-lost king, gone missing after being injured in a battle. It is said that, on nebulous days, you can almost see him through the thick air, adrift in the fog of a forgetful country. This piece is about the battles of ordinary people.

I see the woman in the photo as a representation of what it is to stand at the border between the known and the unknown, the remembered and the forgotten, the “here” and the “there”. The image of the long-lost king is useful as I consider this piece to be very representative of the Portuguese collective identity, one that has a strong emphasis on nostalgia and the past. I tried to extend this riddle to ordinary people and their invisible struggles.

 I don’t know who this woman is. And that is what drove me to this idea of the unknown, the mysterious and the “hard to grasp” concept that the fog represents. In a way, she’s there but she’s not really there. Is she a mirage? Regardless of all that, there’s this intense sense of peace.

Looking back, this was a time in my life filled with uncertainty. I had just taken a leap into the unknown, I was hesitant and apprehensive about the future and found it hard to visualize what would come out of my decisions. I was adrift, but I embraced it and stepped into the fog.”

Catarina has loved photography since she can remember and could be frequently caught stealing her mom’s camera as a kid and use it to capture everyday snippets of their country-side life. More recently, she has started exploring film photography and has fallen in love with the grains and the textures it produces.  She is undoubtedly an amateur but one with a wandering eye.