photo book review

Daily Pilgrims

photographs by
Virgilio Ferreira

In the small, elegant photo book, Daily Pilgrims, city dwellers are portrayed as blurry, anonymous ephemeral phantoms photographed against backdrops of sparkling cityscapes of towering steel and glass and multicolored glowing lights.

To make this series, Portuguese photographer Virgilio Ferreira traveled and photographed in six Asian cities in 2006: Bangkok, Macao, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo. In all of them, territory and behavior are changing fast, and the cities’ inhabitants often seem insignificant and furtive in comparison to the urban structures that surround them.

Ferreira says this about his work:

“In an intuitive and random way, as I walk through the streets I let myself be attracted by lights, colors, scenes, and anonymous people who cross my way and whom I invite to pose. The portraits are made very quickly, but, in a rigorous and selective approach, I try to relate the person and the background. As focus and lack of focus create tension, the unfocused faces turn into fleeting masks."

The "information deficit" caused by the unusual focus technique imbues the atmosphere of all these photos with cool emotion and ambiguity.

This book was published for the Daily Pilgrims exhibition at the Portuguese Centre of Photography, Cadelia da Relacao, Portugal, May 2008.

— Jim Casper

Daily Pilgrims
by Virgilio Ferreira
Self-published
68 color pages
Texts in Portuguese and English
ISBN: 978-972-99756-2-2
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