The Night of Time
Scientific pursuit of the precise action in the photography of Feco Hamburger entails turning night inside out in an irrational challenge to come closer to the nature of time, and, in so doing, connect it to the nature of man. This liaison is sought so that we can speak of a system common to both, attainable through nocturnal images shot with long-exposure times. In the process, the photographer exhumes the “day” revealed by the light invisible to the naked eye drawn from within the depths of the diaphragm, frame by frame. The result is a series of images with intense poetry, captured from a world of silence, captured from the phases of the moon that evoke nights of sunlit bucolic landscapes, captured from a geography that cuts out unthinkable systems, and captured from tense metaphors drawn in neon streaks entirely perceptive of the speed of an image seeking the speed of light amidst a sleeping city. Minutes, hours and nights on end, the photographer awaits in the stillness of a dark-light nothingness that, at the beginning, not even he knew the outcome of which would be – like an experiment that is performed by a scientist faced by a swarm which only physics is capable of producing in time and space, and that yields its first results between the body of earth in motion and the soul of night, as though the mystery were just starting to enfold. A camera resting still and a night in motion: in the first of all sequences, a triptych shows the tops of imperial palms embodying an imagerial construction that depicts a past time, in a vision that recalls the atmosphere typical of some photographs made in the 19th century, and that makes this series gain an identity so serene that it goes beyond the line of time. But the photographs of Feco Hamburger explore the mimesis of the present – it frames the delicate graphic design of stars in a firmament where streaks and rays attest to the fact that “nobody” sleeps in the universe. It transforms situations, inverts architecture, prints a wide-range of colors as independent as they are subtle, opens windows, and creates expectations to show that a constellation reveals itself with the same greatness and simplicity in both the country and the city, ever intent on announcing to man a presence so close yet so unknown. When his square batches perceive the bubble of that which is visible, in the series taken behind the window of a plane, the photographer drifts from a practically emotive sepia intentionally further toward the field of symbolism. He flies toward the nocturne of night, in an endeavor to bring himself closer to that “other” firmament, away from the commonplace, and somewhere between his state of existence and the existence of his images, rife with beauty and meaning, both eloquent and bold, which come from afar and now draw close to give life to the long nights of time.
in Noites em Claro, exhibition catalog, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2004