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Rever

by Gabriela Machado

Photographs: Gabriela Machado

Publisher: Madalena and Terceiro Nome Publishing house

Pictures: 211

Year: 2014

Price: 57 €

Comments: Hardcover. Design: Estúdio Xadrez. Printed in China by Oceanic Graphic

With over 100 million registered users, at present Instagram is the largest photography sharing social network in the world. After publishing almost three thousand images on her profile, artist Gabriela Machado saw her work transformed into a book coedited by Editora Madalena and Editora Terceiro Nome and become a sales highlight at the last edition of Paris Photo, in November 2014. The 211 selected images make up Rever.

In Paris her work caught the attention of the event director, Julien Frydman, who was surprised and pleased to see a photography book with Instagram images. Frydman had complained that “a large blank space at the event was the absence of books dedicated to Instagram”. The following day, visiting the Livraria Madalena stand, Frydman corrected his mistake when he saw the newly launched book. He declared, as he leafed through the publication, “This is the first Instagram- artbook”.

Review brings day-to-day images that reveal the author’s intimacy with the visual arts. They demonstrate a sensitive gaze that deftly plays with shade and texture, building a palette of colors and an edition of coherent and plastic images. “Gabriela’s work has a chromatic aspect which attracts attention. Review is an authorial book, without the vices carried by an experienced photographer, and it builds itself precisely within a book format. Gabriela begins to examine her own work by means of photographs,” declares photographer Claudia Jaguaribe who, together with designer Mariana Lara, is responsible for the book’s image editing.

Gabriela Machado began this creative process in 2011 after a residency at the Carpe Diem Institute in Lisbon. Together with her paintings, the photographs form a diary, mixing scenes that seek out the light, which is sometimes golden, or pink, or yellow, always pulsing. It is timeless piece, where the artist recognizes pictorial strokes, usually her own, bringing forward investigations on bi-dimensional planes and on how to resolve scenery.“I decided on an inverse route: painting my photos, understanding light by doing, not feeling. In Portugal I fell in love with the light, which is at times golden, pink or yellow, always pulsing. The immediacy of that sensation made me want to freeze the images, which led to photography,” recounts the author.

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