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2009 EDITION

July 7th - September 13th

Paulo Nozolino - Mons-Boubert, From FAR CRY

Paulo Nozolino

bone lonely

A man stands in the middle of destruction, feeling lonely to an unbelievable degree, bone lonely.

He makes deaf images during his blind walks. Dwelling with thoughts about the loss in all conflicts, the feeling that all systems fail and the certainty that nothing lasts forever. He wonders what light shines in loneliness, what sounds come out of a moving body, what can fill the absence. He has no answers. He sees silent panic, he hears reports on people, he smells the mould, he feels the flesh ageing and he tastes the dry saliva in his mouth. There seems to be no escape. He has a word pounding inside his head: resist, resistbone lonely.


Paulo Nozolino




FAR CRY

Paulo Nozolino only makes black and white photographs and they are dominated by an impossible darkness that seems impenetrable to light. The photographs were made all over the world—notably in countries of the Arab world—but in the majority of cases it would be difficult to attribute a specific location to any of his images. Photographs from Auschwitz are the exception. Auschwitz is the absolute place and time that orientates everything else.

In the 30 years of his career as a photographer, Nozolino has constantly intensified his tragic vision in pictures that originate from his own history; in pictures of men, women and children; in pictures of birth, lovemaking and death.

This exhibition assembles photographs from Nozolino’s different projects over the years to form a new narrative, untold until now: the narrative of beginning and ending, and at the same time the narrative of his life’s work.


Paulo Nozolino is represented by Galeriea Quadrado Azul, Lisboa.

Original sound : Dominique Besson

Realisation : Valéry Faidherbe and Olivier Koechlin

Executive producer Le Tambour qui parle.


His works SOLO won the Oskar Barnack Award in Arles in 1998.

Paulo Nozolino

Born in 1955 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Lives and works in Lisbon and Paris.


From 1975 to 1978 Nozolino studied at the London College of Printing, and also began a long series of journeys in Europe, the USA and Asia.

He held his first show in Arles in 1986, at the Atelier des Forges.

He lived in Paris in the 1990s. He won a Villa Médicis grant (Hors-les-Murs category) in 1994–95 and in 1996 published Penumbra (Scalo), spanning twelve years of travel in the Arab world; pictures from the book were shown in 1996 at the FNAC Montparnasse store and at the CCB venue in Lisbon.

He received the Grand Prix de la Photographie from the Municipality of Vevey, Switzerland, in 1995 for Solo, a solitary survey of Europe, from Auschwitz to Sarajevo; this exhibition also won the Oskar Barnack Award in Arles in 1998.

In 1999, he worked in Paris with Robert Frank on the film San Yu, then headed for Macao, where he conceived FIM, an exhibition (and associated book) staged at the Culturgest, Lisbon.

In 2002 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, he exhibited a collection of images entitled Nada.

He received a major retrospective exhibition in Porto at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Serralves in 2005; in the same year his book Far Cry (Steidl) received the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis in Stuttgart.

He was awarded Portugal’s National Photography Prize in 2006 for the whole of his uvre; bone lonely (Steidl, 2009) is his most recent book.