Concreto Armado / Reinforced Concrete, 2016

See exhibition views here.

One’s Own Arena creates an arena of visual relationships in the city of Toyama, Japan, portraying men and women in their own circle of confidence and the city’s dark alleys, bars, plants and objects. All is mixed among sequences of intimate images of women in his hotel room, working as studies of the body, a trademark of Cortes' work.Key to the exploration are the surfaces: skin, texture, light and shadow and even film itself is revealed as the essence of what is to be known.

One's Own Arena was exhibited at Fundação EDP/MAAT Musem (Lisbon, 2015 ) and published as book by Pierre von Kleist editions.

One's Own Arena, Pierre von Kleist editions, 2015. See images of the book here.
One's Own Arena, Fundação EDP, Lisbon. Exhibition views here.

For more than 8 years, I kept returning to this magnetic place, just south of Lisbon. 
In 2013, amid a huge financial and social crisis in Portugal, this territory seemed to echo what I was feeling and seeing in Portugal.

Costa da Caparica, a suburb to the south of Lisbon whose beaches are among the most visited by inhabitants of that city. It is also, however, a zone with pockets of social and urban precariousness, a place in which the leisure economy and urban regeneration policies have not been enough to eliminate social, architectural and environmental vulnerability.
The series comprises around 30 images depicting numerous features of this hybrid territory, including places, rudimentary constructions, objects and people. The sequence of images suggests a physical (but also mental and critical) journey made by the photographer through various locations along the Costa Caparica.
According to José Pedro Cortes, ‘the images speak of that strip that exists between the last stretch of civilization and the beach. Shacks, some belonging to fishermen, with little reason for existing; outmoded architecture, remains of houses, dirt left by the tide; an agglomeration of nondescript houses and streets – a peripheral, end-of-the- line location. A frontier zone, on the outskirts of a larger mass, disfigured by time and by the anarchic will of man.’

We are flooded by a strange luminosity; a dazzling and mysterious light which imbues these spaces with a disconcerting and unreal atmosphere, like something seen while in a hypnotic state, encouraging the spectator to participate in a suggestive and paradoxical exploration of individual experience.

See the book here.
Exhibition views of Costa at CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, here.

Tel Aviv, 2008-2009

Things Here and Things Still to Come
Pierre von Kleist editions, 2011. See images here.