Sao Paulo Brazil
A still camera and the night in motion: in Noites em Claro (Sleepless Nights), an acclaimed series celebrating 20 years, Feco Hamburger captures, in long exposure photographs, the accumulation of night light, not visible to the human eye. In a single frame, Feco imprints the record of time – the long time of dawn and the celestial stars. In images of intense beauty and enchantment, photography reveals a surprising firmament of colors, lights and shadows, a nocturnal universe where no one sleeps.
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Feco Hamburger
Guararema-SP, Alguns minutos, Março P.A. (Série Noites em Claro), 2003
C-Print
60 x 60 cm
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Feco Hamburger
Guararema-SP, alguns minutos, Março (Série Noites em Claro), 2001
C-Print
60 x 60 cm
By opening the camera shutter for long periods, from fractions of a second to minutes or hours, Feco obtains a juxtaposition of times in a single frame. Events and nocturnal chromatic phenomena accumulate in elastic time, as if an entire movie were condensed into a single image.
THE INSTANT OF A RAY | “Time remains a great mystery,” says the artist. “From astronomical scales to everyday scales. In Noites em Claro, there are hours of the discreet light of a moonless night and the instant of a bolt of lightning, markers of the times that are approached through photography.”
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Feco Hamburger
São Luiz do Paraitinga-SP, 23:10 – 23:50h, Abril P.A. (Série Noites em Claro), 2004
C-Print
100 x 100 cm
In the apparent darkness of the night, a chromatic world of events is revealed, on a scale that even seems fictional. The photograph is not what the artist sees, but what is revealed when photographing.
WHAT THE LIGHTNING SAYS | “I like to think of lightning as the first flash that ever existed. The design of the lightning and the light on the landscape indicate a creative force or energy, or the initial explosion of a drama on a landscape that is also bucolic.”
Moved by the desire to record the orbit of the stars, I pointed the camera at the valley and waited, next to the open camera, for 35 minutes. When the film was developed, what a surprise: the sky was blue, the valley was green, and the spring flower colored the shot. The exposure time wasn’t long enough to capture the stars in the way I had hoped. But my attention was totally focused on that apparent mystery: how could the darkness of the night be transformed into that photograph? The relationship between time, light in the dark and movement became the focus of my approach. Chance became an essential component. Photography can reveal an existing light, invisible to our eyes, manipulated by the photographic apparatus and by time. Yes, there were many late nights and early mornings of work.
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ENXERGAR O TEMPO | Feco Hamburger discusses the manipulation of the temporal aspect of Noites em Claro, subverting the logic of the photographic instant – one of the central ideas of the work.
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Feco Hamburger
Guararema-SP, aprox. 35 min, Março P.A. (Série Noites em Claro), 2001
C-Print
100 x 100 cm
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Feco Hamburger
Guararema-SP, 22h10-01h10, Agosto P.A. (Série Noites em Claro), 2003
C-Print
100 x 100 cm
Exhibited for the first time in 2004 in a solo show at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, curated by Diógenes Moura, thus becoming part of the institution’s collection, the Noites em Claro series was also included in the Brazilian photography collection of the National Library of France (BnF), in the company of photographers such as Sebastião Salgado, Miguel Rio Branco and Geraldo de Barros.
Feco Hamburger turns the night upside down in an “irrational” challenge to get closer to the nature of time and, in doing so, bring it together with the nature of man, in order to talk about a system common to both. Feco brings out of the diaphragm the “day” that inside the light invisible to the naked eye reveals. The result is images with intense poetry, coming from a world in silence; coming from the phases of the moon that invoke “sunny” nights in bucolic landscapes; coming from a geography that cuts out unthinkable systems; coming from tense metaphors in their neon streaks, in the middle of the sleeping city.
There were photos of valleys, airports, the curve of a road, the urban landscape seen from a window… Of course the celestial lights were there, as well as all the mysterious clarity of the photographic night. However, the pedestrian nature, so to speak, of most of the locations chosen to serve as backdrops for the photos was mixed with the gravity of the celestial bodies captured over a long period of time. A mixture with very stimulating aesthetic dividends.
FRACTAL | “At Pedra Grande in Atibaia (SP), 70 minutes span the time of the stone and the tree under the starry sky. The trail of stars indicates the south celestial pole, behind the stone, on a windless night. The reddish light comes from the valley illuminated by the city’s night lights. The composition points to a kind of fractal”.
Nights in Light establishes a dialog with photography innovators such as Muybridge (1830-1904) and Marey (1830-1904), who combined the experience of time in landscapes and studies of movement, as well as the photographic experience presenting something that escapes us. However, if in them there was a fractioning of movement, in Noites en Claro there is a condensation of time in a single photograph.
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Feco Hamburger
Ampulheta I (Série Sobre a permanência), 2008-2009
Impressão jato de tinta sobre papel de algodão
80 x 80 cm
In later works, such as the series On Permanence, the artist takes his long exposure technique to desert locations such as the Atacama in Chile and the deserts of Israel and Jordan, reinforcing the relationship between time and landscape. To the unchanging, overwhelming and sublime dimension of the deserts, Feco’s open lenses capture intense movements of light and color, revealing “the long time of the desert” — in a place where time seems not to exist.
Darkness can hold everything, like Borges’ Aleph.
IN LIGHT | Feco Hamburger at Pedra Grande, in Atibaia (SP): sunrise heralds the time to collect the equipment, closing the shutter until the next evening, with the curiosity of seeing the film and the night developed.
Over the course of a consistent career spanning more than 20 years, with works in the collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Itaú Collection of Brazilian Photography and the National Library of France, Hamburger has drawn attention to the speculative nature of photography, using photographic devices, processes and protocols to model the world, rather than just recording it. Although born from and marked by an exploration of the limits of photographic language and technique, Hamburger’s poetics overflow the specificities of this language, fluidly entering the speculative and flowing field of contemporary image production. As the critic and curator Ícaro Ferraz Jr. puts it, these are works that are born by precipitation, with no reality prior to the action of the artist-alchemist, who creates the solutions in which they come into existence.
+ moreThus, images are obtained as the residue of processes, in a myriad of elements: rays of light, apparatus and gadgets, printers, papers, displays, scanners, water, oil, soap, sprays, etc. “Feco Hamburger’s use of photography brings him closer to figures such as Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey who, with their studies of movement, pioneered the use of the photographic image as an instrument of knowledge, beyond the documentary, expressive and representational potential of the new optical technology. Hamburger’s images are born of a similar impulse: the artist doesn’t predict or calculate most of the phenomena we see in his works. For this reason, his poetics are an incessant source of wonder, summoning us to the difficult experience of seeing for the first time, in an age marked by an avalanche of images that domesticates the gaze, reducing vision to recognition,” he defines.
