Another Sunday in Porto

If you’ve been following the blog recently, you know what the main focus of the day was this past Sunday - the Henri Cartier-Bresson Tête Á Tête Retratos (Portraits) exhibit.  However, since the old customs building is down by the river, we had to get down there and back, which adds to the story.  So why not join us for our Sunday?

Sometimes you just want to get your day started at a familiar place so, for the second Sunday in a row, we started the day off at Esquires Coffee for a big, hearty breakfast.  Oh, and of course a flat white.  Why not start your day off with a bit of lovely artwork?

We took a new route down to the river, following a pedestrian-only road for most of the way down the hillside.  Besides the fact that almost everything was still closed (except for the cafes), most of the shops seemed oriented towards the tourist trade, which meant we wouldn’t have been interested in them anyway.

Once we hit the Douro River, we headed right (downstream) instead of left (upstream) like we had the previous weekend.  Ann and I have taken to walking at a leisurely pace along the streets (in part to avoid slipping/tripping on the often wet and uneven stones/tiles/pavement that is everywhere, in part because it’s just so relaxing to not be in a rush to get from place to place), and we wound our way to the customs house in due time, not too long after its 10:00 opening.

The show was everything I’d hoped it would be, even with its limited focus on a particular segment of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work that wouldn’t be my first choice to see.  However, the 121 portraits selected for the show were superb, and included many of his famous images.  

They were printed much larger than I thought they would (or could) be, given that they’re all from 35 mm film negatives, and that many of them were photographed in the 1940’s and 1950’s when small film cameras were just getting started.  And they were printed very well.

In addition to images, the show had a few Leica camerass of the type Cartier-Bresson used, lots of quotes, a short film and other examples of his work as it was used in magazines of the time and in books.  

I can say that not only did I see several images that I’d never seen before, as is always the case with Henri Cartier-Bresson, I saw new things in familiar images that I’d not seen before.  I learn something every time I look at his work, which is why I return to him time and time again.  Ann and I stood in front of that portrait to the left below and admired the elegance and beauty of the subjects and their pose.  It couldn’t have been better composed had it been a painting, which speaks to H C-B’s early art education (he returned to drawings when he stopped photographing officially). 

While I can’t say that I love portrait photography generally, there are quite a few Henri Cartier-Bresson portraits I am familiar with and that I was hoping would be in the exhibit.  Many of them were.  He has a portrait of Albert Camus that led Ann to say, “I bet that guy was a rascal!”  And yes, he was - he loved life and living, and it showed in the portrait.

Naturally I was hoping that there would be a photograph of his friend and intellectual companion Alberto Giacometti.  I was gifted with not one, but two Giacometti portraits, as well as a portrait of Pierre Josse (no idea who he is) taken inside Albert Giacometti’s studio with several of Giacometti’s paintings and a sculpture in the background.

If you’ve been following this blog post for a long while, you might recall that way back in 2012 I described Henri Cartier-Bresson as the Picasso of photography (joined by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as perhaps the greatest artists of all time).  Henri Cartier-Bresson did it all and did it all wonderfully!  This show was simply proof of that.  So if you ever get a chance to see his work - do it.  You won’t regret it.  

We took our time at the show, but as with all good things, it came to an end.  That left us with the ultimate question of how to get back to our apartment - yet another climb up the hill.  I gave Ann three options - pretty much the way we came down, the way we went back up the previous week, or pretty much straight up through a part of town we hadn’t seen before following lines on Google Maps that might or might not be roads.  Ann, of course, chose the, “Let’s explore!” route.  (Just one of the many reasons I love Ann!).

The start of the route was indeed an exploration.  One of the lines on the map was not a road, but rather a steep staircase that pretty much went straight up the hill.  At one point it got very steep, with very high steps, and then narrowed to barely two persons wide (yes it had a handrail but . . .).  Eventually, we made it up a near-vertical face, with a lovely view of the customs building, the river and Gaia (obstructed of course by phone wires . . . .).

That steep path then turned into a wider path that led up to a road that switched back towards the center part of town.

As you can tell from above, Porto like many cities has graffiti.  A lot of it.  Sunday morning we even found some new tagging on buildings adjacent to ours - a nice silver garage door that had huge yellow, blue and black letters sprayed on it.  I couldn’t tell what it says (or even what the letters really were), but it was very well done!

Well, on one of the last narrow streets that led out to a main roadway, we came across an eye.    An eye that seemed to look at us.  I just had to photograph it.

And as I turned around, across the street was some more “wall art” of the more natural kind that I’m attracted to.  Nothing to do but keep on photographing!

We continued our wandering, often popping out near a location we were familiar with (at one point seeing the CPF/former Prison) before turning down another side street to explore what was to be found.

We eventually passed by a small restaurant that we’d passed by a few days earlier and its menu of the day looked just as interesting as it had earlier.  So this time we decided to stop.  Portuguese restaurants will often have one or more plates of the day and/or meals of the day (a full 3-course meal).  I settled on an 8€ plate of salmon and potatoes, along with a nice glass of wine.  While McDonalds (as well as Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut) is invading Portugal, this is still the definition of “fast food” in Portugal!  Not particularly fast in the making, nor any pressures for being fast in the eating.  There’s a reason that lunch hours is two hours long in Portugal.

We still had a ways to walk back to the apartment, and we decided to head along a familiar route.  We had reason to.  Earlier in the week we’d passed by a couple of guys doing their graffiti thing on a wall, and while we had a good idea of how it might ultimately turn out, we wanted to see if it was as good as we had . . . hoped for?

It was.

It’s good to know that even Portuguese graffiti artists have some common sense.