Artur Pastor
Photographer
Born in 1922, in an Alentejo that has become numb in the social and economic torpor of a grey and isolated Portugal, Artur Pastor has no parallel in the country and not even in Europe for his ethnographic photography work that exposes in a raw and poetic way the real, hard and sweet facets of the country.
Still today an “unknown” (even in his own country) he is the silent genius, and father of Contemporary European Photography, yet to be “discovered”. Equaling André Kertész or Cartier-Bresson, whose fate and luck transport them to the American editorial market, Pastor never makes the leap because in his country Photography is considered an art of amateurs, dreamers perhaps.
With series such as “A Condição Humana” or “Mundo Rural”, it is as a civil servant working for the Ministry of Agriculture that he travels all over the country for decades, “drawing” it with carbon paper, and leaving an unspeakable heritage for its beauty and extension, today held in its totality by the Lisbon Photographic Archive. He is the poet of images and the shy genius who lets the camera do what technology can never overcome, magic and memory, and always, modernity.
ARTUR PASTOR’S POSTER
