I could say that there are two main axis or driving forces behind
12pm photographic project. The first driving force is this idea of travel. A journey through space and time. This idea of travel in space and time has been always present in my photography.
Does this feeling arise from the process of recording space and time that is photography? Perhaps, but only in part. For me in photography there is always the “I” that I was and the “I” that I shall become. And this transformation occurs in that journey. Just like it does in a real journey to real places, or in an imaginary journey in a good book.
Strange to say, the title, 12 pm, which right from the very moment that I decided to embark on this project I had chosen for the photographs, which make up this volume, and which was kept as the title of the book until Jorge Sousa Braga handed me the poems he had written, felicitously contains the ambiguity of this passage of time in photography.
The expression “pm” is the abbreviation for the Latin phrase post meridiem, meaning after noon, just as in the same way “am” stands for the Latin ante meridiem, or before noon and this is why 11 in the morning is written 11 am and 11 in the evening 11 pm. Logically speaking we would have to say 11 pm, 12 pm, 1 am, 2 am etc.; or, alternatively, 11 pm, 0 am, 1 am, 2 am etc., depending on whether we use a numbering system beginning with one or with zero. Following these rules, 12 pm would correspond to midnight, as would 0 am. Just as I had imagined it when I chose the title. But to my great surprise there are people for whom 12 pm means midday and 12 am midnight. This confusion can be blamed on the behaviour of clocks. When they have dials numbered from 1 to 12 and change from 11.59 to 12.00 they automatically change from am to pm and display 12.00 pm. The same thing happens at night and in the process of advancing from 11.59 to 12.00 they change from “pm” to “am” and show the time as 12.00 am. This operation, as explained above, seems to result to a certain extent in a paradox because it means that after 12 am (midnight) we are surprisingly faced with 1 am, 2 am and so on until 11 am and then we jump ahead again to 12 pm (midday). To put it another way, 12 am and 12 pm are anomalies. Even so, I have found that in some countries this is what happens but we could avoid this confusion by using a numbering system starting at zero. In that way clocks would go from 11.59 pm to 0.00 am and from 11.59 am to 0.00 pm. Whatever you do, however, the formulae 12.00 pm and 12.00 am will always have something ambiguous about them just as, in the final analysis, the temporal ambiguity of photography.
Therefore the first set of axis for 12 pm project is this 2D time-space system, defining a two dimensional plan.
The second driving force is the close dialogue between photography and poetry.
The things which are most able to surprise and seduce us in both are in the end the simplest of things in nearly every case: a gust of wind in the grass, a flock of birds in flight, a familiar old smell, a puddle, a mysterious light. It was the magic glow of that unforgettable night at the edge of the Norwegian Sea that entranced me. And thus the journey commenced from the beginning again.
This close relationship has been clear in my mind for many years. This project has the cooperation of the Portuguese poet Jorge Sousa Braga, who wrote short poems for 12pm project. This image-word relationship could be viewed once more as a new kind of time-space relationship. A new 2D plan.
My idea is to design the architecture of the site space to be built for 12 pm project, based on these 2 sets of axis or these 2 two driving forces: the idea of travel in time-space and the dialogue between images and words, photography and poetry.
