This exhibition is born as a continuity of the celebrations of the Centenary of the Birth of Fernando Lemos (Lisbon, May 3, 1926 – São Paulo, December 17, 2019), an unavoidable figure of 20th-century Portuguese Art, whose work crossed geographical borders, artistic languages, and different fields of thought.

In 2024, Jorge Barbosa launched a challenge to a wide group of personalities: photographers, artists, designers, journalists, writers, musicians, and people who, not making photography their daily activity, maintain with it a relationship of curiosity, affection, or interest. The proposal was simple and, at the same time, open: to share a captioned photograph.

The response was immediate and singular. 78 participants accepted the challenge, giving rise to a set of images as diverse as the people who produced them. These are photographs that do not necessarily seek “professional” photography, nor do they obey a common theme or language. On the contrary, they reveal different ways of looking, of choosing, of approaching, or of distancing oneself from the world.

Gathered in this exhibition, these images constitute a sort of cadavre-exquis of the collective portrait — not only of the people who photograph, but also of a community of gazes. Lisbon, Porto, Sintra, Aveiro, Brussels, Dublin, Rome, London, Macau, Bordeaux, New York, and so many other places become points of an affective and visual geography that extends far beyond a single territory.

The diversity of the participants — photographers and photojournalists, writers and musicians, visual artists, designers, journalists, teachers, producers, managers, illustrators, researchers, and other people linked to different areas — reinforces an essential idea: photography belongs to all those who look.

In this context, the exhibition also establishes a dialogue, necessarily free and contemporary, with the legacy of Fernando Lemos, where his gaze was, above all, a way of experiencing the world and of revealing that which, at times, remains invisible.

Cadavre – Exquis. Photographing in continuity thus proposes another form of homage: not an exhibition about Fernando Lemos, but an exhibition that departs from his photographic memory to summon new gazes. Each photograph is a choice, an approximation, a suspension of time. Together, they form a story made of many stories — personal, professional, intimate, documentary, poetic, or simply occasional.

Fernando Lemos inspires us to look at photography as a creative possibility of seeing the world.

This exhibition is, therefore, also an encounter: between generations, geographies, professions, and sensibilities; between those who photograph every day and those who photograph only when something challenges them; between the memory of an artist and the vitality of the gazes of today.

78 photographs. 78 ways of looking. A collective story.

Curators
Marlene Oliveira, Jorge Barbosa and Perfecto E. Cuadrado