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2010 ‘ THE WORLD THROUGH MY EYES’
ANA CARLOTA MEIRELLES PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION
OPENING RECEPTION: JAN.21, THURS. 5:00PM TO 8:00PM, 2010
EXHIBITION DATES: JAN.22 TO JAN.25, 2010
VENUE: XYZ GALLERY, 798 ART CENTER OF BEIJING (D05)
CONTACT INFORMATION: 010 8459 9299
ORGANIZED BY EMBASSY OF PORTUAL IN BEIJING
IN COLLBORATION WITH XYZ GALLERY BEIJING
INTRODUCTIONARY ARTICLE
I remember to enjoy taking photos since I was a child. I took them from family , friends and also from places and people I knew, during my childhood and adolescence in Mozambique, where I was born.
This has allowed me, even today, to recall more vividly those already remote “good old days” spent in Africa, which I left when I was eighteen years old.
Maybe the preservation of the memory of those so dear and distant moments, kept through pictures of those unforgettable times, led me, through my whole life, lived in different countries, to want to retain photographically moments, sceneries and faces, which time with its unavoidably changes brings along and allows us to revive our past, sometimes almost magically.
But only upon coming to China, in October 2006, together with my husband, then appointed Ambassador of Portugal, did I started to get seriously interested in photography. I was amazed by the first impressions of this fascinating country, for us still so different.
I started then using a small “Pentax Optico S” camera that I had bought for our vacation trip to Brazl in 2005. I remember to have spent my first months taking pictures all the time, to record all the “discoveries” that came under my eyes provided by this huge country, full of striking and impressive contrasts.
On the day my husband offered to me a new camera, a “Nikon D40x”, a simple hobby was converted, almost without notice, into something more serious to me. I found it out when we first traveled, in the summer 2007, to Gansu and Xinjiang where we went on vacation. Just for fun, I submitted two photos taken during that trip to a photo-contest in the USA organized within the “China-America Festival of Film and Culture 2007” named “Behind the Great Wall” and, to my great surprise, I won two awards with the same photo: the best picture in the contest and the most Intriguing Landscape.
In 2009 I participated in the “Beijing in the Eyes of Foreigners” contest and five of my photos among thousands were selected to the final short-list. This was another enormous revelation and acted as an incentive to strive to live up my potential as a photographer and to improve technically in as much as possible.
To take photos is for me furthermore a great pleasure and a fascination. In the very moment I shoot a picture and look through the viewfinder, the vision of the surrounding world changes to me. I have the feeling to be able to penetrate into its intimacy in a deeper and even mysterious way, as if I could capture the soul of what I can see through it.
What I like most to photograph, are people, in their innocence and spontaneity, without artificial and studied poses, landscape with its peculiar contours or contrasts and everything with colours, strong colours,, red in particular.
With my stay in China coming to an end and as a way to mark this unforgettable chapter of my life, I decided to hold this exhibition to show some of the many photographs I have taken here and that will always remind me of the privilege I enjoyed in living in this great country for just more than three years. I hope you will like them and think of it as being worthwhile.
I wish to thank to Catherine Cheng, Xueyi Fan, João Barroso and Liu Hui for all the precious assistance provided to me in organizing and holding this exhibition. And also to my dearest friend, Concha Bernaldez, wife of the Spanish Ambassador, and to my husband Rui, for having encouraged me to fulfill this dream.
Ana Carlota Meirelles
Beijing, January 2010 | 
