In a conversation with photographer @marianorton, we delved into how her journeys through cities and her political science roots intertwine, weaving a visual language that captures the complexity of contrasting worlds.
@MOCHIS Your work is shaped by a journey that moves between places, cultures and realities. How do the cities you’ve lived in—Rio, London, Rome, Paris, Lisbon—reveal themselves in your photography?
@MN The diversity of cities come to emphasize my curiosity and desire to understand what inhabited and defines these different places — be it people, objects, environments, architecture, landscape, and how they are politically and social constructed.
This perspective is always present in the realities I experience and the world I am part of — the relation between beauty around me, and its fragility, decay and ephemerality, its transitory character.
@MOCHIS Your academic background is in political science, with a focus on violence, conflict, and development. How does that intellectual foundation shape the way you frame an image?
@MN After four years of study and five years of work and travel in developing and unstable countries, I have continuously questioned the reasons behind the many conflicts, violence, and barriers to achieving peace worldwide.
This ongoing concern about the world we live in, also applies to my intimate surroundings and generation which concerns about climate change, extremist movements and racism, definitely influence my perspective and work.
These themes are constantly present in
my mind and subtly embedded in my images
and projects, hiding a political
and social tone.
@MOCHIS Your images often carry a sense of movement of life unfolding in real time, as if you’re simply moving through fleeting scenes. What draws you to these organic and unstaged moments?
@MN What attracts me to these moments is exactly their uniqueness in time, and the sensation and feeling they provoke in me, leading to the need of making an image. The work on “République Démocratique du Congo” followed by the “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is exactly a reflection of that — how can these two different and contrasting worlds cohabit?
One of war, violence and poverty and another of intimacy, amusement, shining, and lightness. It is between these two worlds in which I stand and question how we live and conceive such contrasting and ambiguous realities.
One provokes
the need to escape
from the other.
@MOCHIS Has there ever been a moment where you didn’t realize you’d captured something special until after you saw it outside the camera?
@MN I only shoot with analog, so there is always this expectation of seeing what will come after developing the film.
I bought a Mju-ii some years ago, which has been quite instrumental in catching these spontaneous moments in a discrete way, only possible with a point and shoot. The first picture I exposed of a green skirt and leg on a carpet untitled “Green Satin on Arraiolos” is exactly the result of that.
Currently, I am exploring more formal and stable types of cameras - medium and large format — which will lead me to another type of images. I am still experimenting.
@MOCHIS Which artist has had the most significant influence on your work and in what ways do you see their impact reflected in your own creative process?
@MN It’s hard to pick one. The work of @Nan Goldin — and her political and social activist character — was one of the first to visually impact me due its combination of rawness, intimate, vulnerable and decaying environment. The same applies for @Wolfgang Tillmans, where his intimate images of his surroundings which are at the same time a poetic and intriguing expression of contemporary life, also care a tone of social and political awareness.
@MOCHIS What’s the last thing you captured with your camera?
@MN My grandmother. I just initiated a project about how she perceives her days and the world, once she’s in the unfortunate process of getting blind.
Comments