Amarante International Photography Festival

And lo and behold, the eyes notice.

One must stop to see. We are already here, now it is time to stay. Learn to want to look. Let yourself stay and appreciate. Seeing is an art. You have to explore it, absorb it, and then share it. The eyes have a party.

There is a time beyond us, a time that is lived in each instant, and all the instants together make a life. Our life.

Inside a photograph fits the world. And it fits each one of us. What we are, what we were, and what we want to be and live.

Each photographed instant is a passport to utopia. There, in that eternalized moment, lives a unique space, which allows itself to question, reflect, to look.

So may our eyes ask.

2022 Rephoto

For three days, Amarante will host f/est Amarante, the International Photography Festival that had in the year 2021 its zero edition under the theme “Seeing with eyes of staying”.

In 2022, f/est Amarante returns to the streets of Amarante in a wider and more international version.

The concept remains as being a street festival that intends to reflect on the look. Not only through the aesthetic sense but also through this unique way of questioning our world through photography.

Days

photographers

Agata Kay

Keynote
May 29th — Museu Municipal Municipal Amadeo Souza-Cardoso

Schedule 2022

photographers

spots in Amarante

2021 Seeing with lingering eyes

Where you don’t expect it, it exists. It existed.

That’s how year zero of f/est Amarante was. It was there, everywhere. The challenge was to see more than to look. It was necessary to move away to focus, to feel the details. To highlight the senses. The eyes fixed on the instants of the city, the people who passed, the people who stayed.

In the first of all f/est Amarante we were light, contrast, image. We were art with emotion and the surprise of an encounter on any second of a street.

I’m glad you went. I’m glad we met.

For a month, from July 17th to August 17th, Amarante showed itself in improbabilities. In places where it wasn’t supposed to be, we went. The challenge was to go looking. Perhaps the surprise was an encounter or re-encounter with the material and immaterial heritage that exists and persists.

With memory always nearby, f/est Amarante invited us to look at the present with photographers Paulo Pimenta and Leonel Castro, at the past through the posthumous tribute to Antero de Alda, and to peek into the future with João Silva’s vision.

The photographs, like life, were everywhere. You had to look, to see. Starting in the center, or ending there. There were 24 photographs spread all over the municipality of Amarante.

Amarante is a territory always ready to be revealed and, in the zero edition of f/est AMARANTE, we wanted to register the future memory.