Odisseando: The Artist and His Project

It's one thing to take photographs because we can. Striking poses worthy of a Facebook profile picture. Making faces at the photographer. Raising a glass of wine and toasting some invisible person because it looks good and, one day, someone will see the photograph and – smiling to themselves – they'll think that it was part of a beautiful moment. It's one thing to go travelling and take photos outside the Apple Store in New York, before there were any other such photos in existence in the whole world. Or to take a photo from the water of the bluest-skied Ibizan beach. Or to take a photo of Bonnie Tyler when we see her tottering by in Albufeira, and that is something that certainly doesn't happen every day.

Somebody invented the camera to eternalise such memories. So that in case one day when we have Alzheimer's, or simply when life's chapters become so chock-full that it seems impossible for us to remember every salient moment and episode of our lives, there is that piece of paper (or in more modern terms, the JPEG file on our computers) to remind us that it did indeed happen. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that La vida no es la que uno vivió, sino la que recuerda y cómo la recuerda para contarla (Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it). Well, I would go further than that and say that Life is not what we lived, but what we photographed in order to recall later on. I know, it's clearly inspired by a Kodak slogan.

Then there are those people for whom Photography (capitalised because we are talking about it as art) is a form of communication. Even a way of living and breathing. Perhaps with that compact machine of light-heartedness they even manage to capture photographs of their friends during nights of drunken intoxication, whilst retaining an enviable respect for their art. And they invest in it, buying cameras that cost as much as cars and adventuring through the fabulous world of accessories: macro lenses, magical tripods, kilometric focal lengths... all this to enable them to depict reality better. Their reality.

I know a person like this. He swapped Madrid for Dublin 6 years ago before surrendering to Lisbon 1 year ago. He is around here (living and working), he photographs our beautiful city with the fresh perspective of a tourist, but with a resident's sense of intimacy.

Why am I telling you about him today?

Because Alatryste (his artistic and on-line name) has created an incredibly interesting project: he asked all his friends and colleagues to give him a word, a concept, or a phrase. His proposal was to translate these concepts into photographs. And, from this, a real artistic project has emerged. Now, his Interactive Photography Project has been published as a book and we could all offer this to an artistic soul within our group of friends this Christmas period. As if that weren't enough, 50% of the sales revenue will be donated to Greenpeace. Even in times of crisis, we cannot forget two things: generosity and our love of art.

From this project, these are my favourites:

Silky Sweetness