My friends tell me I take too long to show them photographs. It feels as if I went to Portugal more than a few months ago, and I haven't taken many photos (save favours for friends - pictures of parties and portraits exchanged for dinners) since then. But winter in Europe feels like an endless dusk, and in Portugal's cloud-empty twilight colours glow and bounce, and inside museums are dark corridors filled with cold and gold, a gold that is cold, a cold that is gold, et cetera. I'm writing this in a casual, moody sort of way, but I could say, empirically, these things are true: this city has only a few clouded days each year; its wealth is from a period when everything was ornate. Photography is (or should be) about light, the trapping and imprisonment of light. Lisbon was inky, shadowy, saturated, and lit with quiet drama.
