In A Necessary Realism, José Pedro Cortes revisits his archive. Five years after Costa (2013), a series marked by disillusion and stagnation that mirrored the European crisis, he pulls out individual images and weaves them together with others, old and new. He abandons the logic of series and instead thinks of his work as a continuous line, a “lifetime project” in the spirit of Harry Callahan.
Freed from their original context, the images gain force: time becomes fluid, places hard to pin down, and the gaze moves from portrait to landscape, day to night, reality to abstraction. Four repeated sequences punctuate the book, including twelve images of a woman in a makeshift studio, a true collaboration between sitter and photographer.
Cortes doesn’t change time; he reorders it. In a society that is increasingly filtered and inward-looking, he argues for a necessary realism: urgency should return to the centre of photographic practice, by looking, and looking again.
Published in 2018 by Pierre von Kleist editions / MNAC, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado.
From October 2018 to September 2021, José Pedro Cortes followed Portuguese triple jumper Patrícia Mamona through her training at the Centro de Alto Rendimento do Jamor in Lisbon, working almost invisibly alongside her. The result is the portrait of a solitary performer, where body and mind are constantly balanced between determination and exhaustion, and where she is her only competitor.
The project ended a month after she won silver at the Tokyo Olympics with a personal and national record of 15.01 metres. Throughout the book, her daily routine unfolds alongside a parallel montage of that winning jump.
Published in 2023.
For nine months, José Pedro Cortes lived in Tel Aviv. During this period, he met four young Jewish women who were born in the USA. They had all decided, at the age of 18, to go to Israel to do their military service. After completing the required two years of service, they decided to stay and live in this idyllic Middle Eastern city.
