Lisbon holds many souls within it, yet in the images that portray it and in the photographs of those who visit it, it often remains trapped in a single narrative. Portuguese photographer Mag Rodrigues, born in Lisbon in 1991, looks at it from another point of view. Her research, halfway between documentary and author-driven photography, focuses on the city’s vernacular dimension, made of details, materials, colours and forms that no one designed to be admired.
Her collection of images dedicated to her hometown shows small urban compositions, glimpses and corners that you have to go looking for. A marble staircase with worn steps, the entrances of the oldest houses, people living the city in their everyday routines, the colours that now and then appear from a window or a balcony.
What emerges is an accidental aesthetic, one that is not constructed in any way but unearthed by an eye able to look beyond tourist attractions and the extraordinary. Mag Rodrigues, in fact, does not look for the monument or the postcard, but for what everyday life produces in silence, almost without noticing.
It is a narrative consistent with the rest of her career and her projects, from Subsolo to As Senhoras, from Covidário to Mãos, where attention always goes to what tends to remain at the margins of our gaze. Here the margin becomes the city itself, observed with the patience of someone who knows that the beauty of a place often lies in its least declared details.
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