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Souls 40 Years
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta (2013)
The etymological origin of the word soul
is the Old Saxon seola that indicated the immaterial part
of the human as well as the idea of fast movement.
The ancient etymological root of the Romantic words for soul
- âme in French, anima in Italian or alma
in Portuguese and Spanish - is the Indo European *ane,
which indicated the idea of vital blow and passed to the Greek
anemos meaning wind.
Wind points out to movement and thus we have animation, animal
and so on. But the ideas of wind and of blow also show us a mysterious
connection with culture and environment, both meaning
"to turn around", like when we blow on something.
The complex fusion of the immaterial part of a human being -
like the photography - and culture while wind, movement that
produces difference and with it consciousness, is the conceptual
basis of this photographic essay.
Forty years ago, in 1973, I started a photographic project about
which I could not predict the amazing surprises that would happen.
It literally is a life project, in all its senses. The first
image was of an old poor Japanese man in Brazil. I was fifteen
years old. He was a man with terrible histories. His personal
path profoundly moved me. I was conscious that each person is
a complete universe, a miracle of experiences and knowledge,
not matter who is or what does. With that first shot I decided
to develop a long photographic essay, with the extension of an
entire life. Always in progress. Forty years passed like a blink
of eyes. Along the years I have met extraordinary people. Vladimir
Maiakovski said that "everybody is made to shine" -
and since many years ago I took his statement as the basis of
this essay, together with Joseph Beuys when he said that "everyone
can be an artist". It is not about individualism in the
sense of isolated individuals, but the contrary: people who create
the fabric of our times, our zeitgeist - because the collective
emerges from the individual, never the opposite.
In 2001, SOULS was published on cd-rom with one hundred and
fifty images dated from 1975 to 2000, the last quarter of the
20th century. Since the 1990s, SOULS has also happened as a photographic
exhibition for museums and art centers in diverse places.
In 2008 I published an electronic book about its thirty-five
years of images.
Now, we have three hundred and fifty persons or, if you prefer,
souls - people from forty countries!
This 40 Years edition of Souls is dedicated to Lucrezia De Domizio
Durini, a kind friend with whom I've collaborated in mutual projects
since almost twenty-five years ago. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini
has dedicated her entire life to join people, to defend Art as
an essential civilizational tool. She wrote the introduction
of the SOULS cd-rom published in 2001 - then a twenty-five years
project.
I would like to thank the great art curator, critic and historian
Pilar Parcerisas for her wonderful introduction for this book
- which is divided in four volumes.
All my thanks also to Nina Colosi and Jenniffer Baahng for their
always great support and generosity.
The 40 Years Souls Project is happening as a book, a website
at http://www.emanuelpimenta.net/souls40/, a formidable project
at the Streaming Museum of New York City, and an event-exhibition
at Baahng & Company in Manhattan.
If we would be able to enter in the interior of every person,
from the king to the miserable in the street, we would clearly
see that all them are magnificent universes of life, without
exception.
Now I just reminded Meister Eckhart when he said, in the passage
from the 13th to the 14th centuries: "If a person withdraws
into himself, with all his powers, mental and physical, he comes
at last to a condition in which he has no ideas and no limitations
and in which he exists without activity of inner or outward life".
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