Albano da Silva Pereira

photographer

Albano da Silva Pereira, born in Coimbra in 1950, has developed an unorthodox career in photography. The public presence of his work began in 1980, with a series of images on the island of Mozambique, and has always developed in parallel with the other activity that has occupied him, the direction of the Encontros de Fotografia de Coimbra (and later the Centro de Artes Visuais), which began in 1981. Perhaps this second activity has gained more visibility than his artistic work, but the creation and production of images is at the heart of his world, which also includes his obsession with collecting artifacts, stones, cactus and images.
To make an archaeology of his creative work, we would have to go back to the beginning of his photographic activity, during the colonial war, when he was in Africa for the first time, the matrix to which he always returns. Next, we need to understand his relationship with cinema, since he was assistant and photographer to António Pedro Vasconcelos and Manoel de Oliveira, and cinema is his way of seeing.
Thirdly, there is his relationship with Robert Frank, whom he met in the 1980s and brought to Portugal for the first time in 1986 for an exhibition at the Encontros de Fotografia de Coimbra.