Interview • 121 PH

Anna Paola Guerra

Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Please introduce yourself—what is your name, where are you from, what do you do?

My name is Anna Paola Guerra, I was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the city where I live and work. I lived in Germany for a year when I was a teenager. I graduated in Physics, started doing a master's degree, but I've changed my field of studies and studied design instead. I work as director and designer for advertising movies.

What is your relationship with photography, and how did you get into it?

Photography is my most important existential activity, it's where all my psychic and bodily work converges. I don't know when I really started. I photographed when I was in Germany—when I was first given a camera—but I think that in a more expressive and active way, it was later, when I bought my first camera.

What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?

I'm in fact captured: it can be a point of light, a shape, a presence, without this word taking on any mystical significance, but it is something, like in a game of reflection between the outside and the inside, a ping-pong game. I think of photography as being between predisposition and chance, driven by a desire to encounter alterity.

What is the story you want your pictures to tell?

They are just a testimony to an event or an encounter that happened. I have no intention of telling stories, I think they are in a layer beyond meaning, beyond sense. Whether they will be understood as a narrative or not depends on each person who comes into contact with them.

Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?

II'd like to revisit Naples, I was there for ten days in 2022, it's a very impressive city, it has a fatalistic and insolent character, it's sacred and profane. Complex, with overlapping temporal and cultural strata, catacombs, palaces and the ordinary. Ruin, decay and death are always present as signs in the city. At the same time, it is a city of intense life and celebration. In a way, Naples is the Vesuvius.

What is your personal relationship to cities, and how do you perceive them as places in general?

I like to walk around, observe normal life, people, eat in the places where the locals eat, visit the markets, the botanical gardens, I like to get lost, I generally prefer the streets to museums.

What is the driving force behind creation?

The desire to encounter alterity and an unanswered question that is always renewed.

Which project did you never finish?

Photographing is always in progress until the day I die.

What is that one thing you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?

I'm not sure I understand the question correctly. In the creative process there are prolific periods and others of scarcity, of absence. I think one engenders the other, it's up to us to learn to overcome the periods of lack.

If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?

There is no going back in time with the experiences gained along the way, the accumulation of everything puts us in the present moment. The past was made up of the lack of what was acquired along the way, so no advice is possible.

What do you prefer saying: «to take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?

Neither way, in both ways it is the subject who directs the action and who pretends to be the only one who is active and conscious. For me, photography is an exchange and I even question the fixed positions of subject and object. If I think it's an exchange, perhaps the zone of interest shifts to the between and I include a third party in the dual relationship.

What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?

The experience of being seen and captured by things is one of them.

If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?

I've always been interested in the diverse, almost everything interests me, my curiosity is always reactivated. I think photography is just one of the interfaces of the same creative structure.

How would you describe one of your pictures to a blind person?

I would ask this person to guide me, I would try to answer his*her questions.

What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?

I'm always photographing, the camera is always with me; even in some dreams I try to take the camera out of my bag to photograph something, but usually I don't have time—the thing falls apart until I manage to aim at it. I am working all the time, as I already mentioned before, all my psychic and bodily work converges in this activity. My project is all the picutres I created, I am creating. It is always in progress. Perhaps one day I'll will focus on a specific theme.

Thank you, Anna!

Editorial Notes

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Photography: Anna Paola Guerra (2022)
Location: Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Links: Website, Instagram

Belo Horizonte, Brazil

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