An anthropological project
beyond photography

The proposal of the author of the project, the photographer Carlos Barradas, goes beyond photography and settles in the physical anthropology of Campanhã, a suburb of Porto with a unique sense of itself. The role of photography is not only immortalising, but also forms part of the author’s field research, a photographic documentation project carried out by the residents of the neighbourhood themselves through workshops and also a work of social anthropology, building relationships between the residents of the neighbourhood. The visual identity of the project is a confrontation between that which is programmed and that which is born organically in the construction of any community. Thus, the graphic abstraction constructs an urban mesh open to dialogue between the typographic part (which represents what is planned urbanistically) and the photograph (which are the organic buildings born of social necessity). The blank spaces become spaces traversed by people. The communication strategy created for the project uses different conventional supports for social purposes: the website is conceptualized as a repository of the urban memory of Campanhã; the two fanzines resulting from two workshops held during this period highlight the views of the residents; and, finally, the traveling exhibition becomes a place for conversation and social relations. The fanzines were designed in a large, newspaper format, to become the medium where people could see the value of their work published in an element of information that is very common in the street, becoming news. The web also seeks this structured and linear part, but it expressly contradicts the structural: the scroll down works as a horizontal scroll where the integration of the photographs is more organic and multi-format. Here the work of the fanzines is replicated: a structural base that then has more organic volumetric moments.