Restless? No. Somewhat restive? Perhaps. From the very first pages of the book we embark upon a journey all across the city. Somebody walking ahead of us, then another, and then a third, crossing our path; and again, later, a figure striding along by the viaduct, taking a shortcut down a grassy slope, following the railway tracks. Almost all are men who seem to have been momentarily disquieted. Followed by the gaze of a photographer who (for us) remains unseen. On the way, in the blazing sun, a dog scampers towards us – as though racing against his own shadow. And then we see a mattress, propped into a gap in a wall, sheltering rough sleepers. Protruding from a tree, tied to a branch, a large bicycle tyre forms a circle, a zero, nil, in the landscape. In the book this is juxtaposed with a climbing frame for children long since departed. The paint of its metal frame is peeling away and the cloths wrapped around it here and there cannot stop the decay. Reality can do little to counter the colourful, radiant, underglass luminosity of smartphones. That is one way of reading these photographs. Finally, in this introductory sequence, we see two stakes driven into the ground: one of perforated metal in the shape of a cross, and the other a T-shaped rod of solid iron. Both gauged, both implanted at different times, and, as we read it, both expressing the same verdict: yes, this is the precise spot. Tall, raised signs of an invisible surveyance, hidden geometrification and the functionalisation of nature. Followed by the close-up portrait of a man immersed in thought.

Later, there are two rear shots, each showing the back of a person – one shyly upright in a greenish-yellow shirt across which a leather bagstrap runs diagonally, and the other sitting, shoulders slumped, in a shabby leather jacket, clearly taking a break on the way somewhere. Then the path leads upwards, to an open space high above the city, above the neighbourhood; a dead-end path, like a railway siding, a path where the paving slabs falter, sheering off and crumbling in the face of the heavy-duty wire netting, and seem to lose their energy to lead and direct our steps. The path may end here, but the gaze does not. The cul-de-sac offers a wide open view into the city. Neither picturesque nor select, but an objective, confirmative view of everyday normality. 

A man sits, resting and waiting, on an embankment, in the shadow of a tree, his arms propped on his knees. He has time; he is looking away. On a rise above a wall stands the statue of a military sentry. We see him from behind, his back ramrod straight, standing guard with his rifle, bayonet and helmet as he looks to his right. He is standing guard over a cemetery in memory of the colonial wars in and with Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. This image is followed by that of an elderly man in a suit carefully wending his way down a shortcut on a grassy slope, carrying a nylon holdall, with a Santander Totta office building in the background. Moving on, we see some planks roughly nailed together to form a bridge or walkway over a stream that runs between overgrown backyards. Finally, in the harsh glare of the sun, amidst a sea of scattered plastic waste – white, blue, orange – we see a man bending forwards; it is unclear whether he is searching through the waste and collecting it or whether he is the person who scattered it. Here, as elsewhere in the book, we tend to add the description: a black man, even though we would never write «a white man», finding no need to emphasize what we perceive as «normal» and «familiar». Most of the «black» men and women come from former Portuguese colonies. The beginning closes with this tall, pale, roughly rendered wall, straight in front of us – a gateway sealed up and blocked off. Abstraction and concretion, sign and story all in one. No entry. The access pathways have clearly shifted; past functions have been changed at some time.

Each of us – whether viewer, curator, editor or publisher – accompanies André Cepeda through the city of Lisbon, stepping in and walking around and seeing it from different and ever changing angles, meandering with him through a town that is also relatively new to him. He moved here from Porto two years ago with his partner and their children – albeit after a few detours; after spending his childhood in his native Coimbra, after several years in Holland as a youth, and some time in Belgium, after an intense life in Porto, which he considers to be his «own» town. He snakes his way around in this new town, exploring it and making it his own, delving into it, kicking against it, seeking, looking, observing, questioning and combing through it – not so much in a descriptive way, as in the form of a survey that charts and maps the urban reality by following its landmarks and lesser-known focal points, but instead as though using his camera to push up against the urban body of Lisbon by exploring, pursuing, examining, permeating and rubbing up against it, immersing himself in it, honing his senses and sharpening his thoughts on this vast new challenge, and on this new form of immersion into a structure or body. 

André Cepeda’s project – the way I read it – is like a long, continuous walk – at times hesitant, at times hurried, at times even relaxed – in broad daylight, at twilight, in the dark and gloom of night, along many different paths that intersect, leading upwards and downwards, surging into the appealing, yet forbidding, glittering heights of the business world or emerging from the all-consuming murkiness of the sewers. Yes, he approaches the city from different angles, yet his incursions are rarely into the more salubrious and prestigious districts, or the tourist areas. At some point in the middle of the book he strolls past high-tech facades of glass and steel, blinded by the light bouncing off the metal surfaces and the bright aluminum elox shining in the darkness. Yet all of these buildings seem closed, locked, forbidding, excluding, evidently not for everyone or for all, and not at any time. André Cepeda’s photographs push against this. The buildings and their architecture seem alienating. The people of a city are never as united and integrated as we so often dream and hope. 

André Cepeda explores the city. But he himself remains, for the most part, an outsider. We find very few interiors in his project. It is as though he were pushing against the facades, the doors of the houses, the windows, and as though the city were not yet willing to let him in, and as though, in turn, he could not quite have full confidence in this city, this life, these pathways, nor even in his own sense of direction among them. Only occasionally does he enter a building, an apartment, visiting friends, making portraits of them and their living space, whether glancing to the left into a corner, or towards a window where the light streams in. And then there is this one greyish-green interior, where the television is on, with curry-coloured towel hanging on one of two overlapping doors, a bag on the left and a wicker basket on the lower right. The room seems to encapsulate the interior of all interiors, like a pars pro toto of a certain outside world. 

«The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld», title of a famous book by Peter Handke, formulates the awareness that each sentence – or in the case of André Cepeda, each image – has a history.  With the result that «the sentence by sentence description of the outerworld constitutes simultaneously a description of the innerworld, the consciousness of the author and vice versa and again vice versa». Just as all the passageways, streets and corners are woven into the urban fabric, so too does the order of this interior appear like the inner fabric or psychogram of those who live there. Whoever lives here seems to be out and about. Just like the photographer.

Not there, already gone, on the way, out in front, over there: direct encounters with another individual are few and far between. But when such contacts do occur, they take the form of an almost unfathomably haunting portrait: the woman with the long blonde hair drawing deeply on her cigarette, in a bright blue shirt and dark sunglasses, bathed in the glow of the evening light; a woman in a dark blue night scene, with silver-streaked hair and eyes wide open, also smoking intensely; the double portrait of a woman with an unruly mane of red hair, first in black-and-white, then in colour, first in semi-profile and then with direct eye contact – these are rare but striking moments of direct contact. We find that it is not always possible to discern whether the sitter has taken note of the photographer with the same intensity. As a rule, he follows the men, their paths crossing in time-lapse, whereas he confronts the women directly, standing opposite them, getting right up close to them, just as they reciprocally allow that closeness.

André Cepeda seems to follow the dogs, the stravaigers, the night-owls and the unemployed through the cavernous channels of some complex organism. But almost always silently – if that word makes any sense at all in photography – yet with a strongly heightened alertness and a perspicacity that seems to meld the senses of smell, touch and sight into a single overarching awareness. However, he does not, as one might think, undertake his forays with a small snapshot camera or a smartphone, but with a medium-format camera, a viewfinder camera, always with a tripod tucked under his arm and the black cloth in his bag. Given the energy of the city, the night-time vibe, the lonely, deserted squares, the use of this photographic approach seems astonishing and, at first glance even counterproductive, if not downright «dangerous». Because whenever André Cepeda wants to take a photo, he disappears for a while under the black cloth. In other words, he stands out and makes himself vulnerable, losing all control over his own «existence» while he selects the frame and triggers the shot. In return, both he – and we, as observers – are rewarded with the exceptional intensity of his images and the forcefulness with which they lie or hang before us with all their density of information and richly nuanced tonality. At the same time, the large format and the sometimes extended timeframe involved tend to concentrate and reinforce their photographic power, their photographic detail and representation, not to mention the viewing angle, the standpoint of the photographer and the chosen distance from the «motif» or subject matter rendered.

André Cepeda’s photography is not conceptual. It does not follow a prescribed structure or clearly formulated concept, nor is it in this regard a static and confirmatory documentation or proof. Rather, it is an expression of what is seen, lived, experienced, explored, sensed, smelled and tasted. Cepeda opens himself up to the given situation, to many situations, and to different times and grey areas, which in this case means the city of Lisbon. He rambles through this city, following his instincts, his curiosity, his will to tackle the urban reality head on and get closer to it by immersing himself in it. This is a very personal form of visual urban and social archaeology in real time. Although he is usually out and about with a professional camera, a big box and a tripod, taking 4x5-inch photographs, his images often look as though some wet-nosed stray dog had snapped them while sniffing around the urban textures, the paving, the facades, the stairwell tiling and all the different materials, rooting into corners and exploring situations, with inherent sensitivity. And then moving on. 

The result is the ballad of a city, a visual song of the built environment and its architecture, a ballad of the urban system, of community, of individual and collective existence, and of power structures. Visual snippets of today’s society, often viewed from its faltering margins, the place from where we can best ascertain the qualities of any society. There are no signs here of the high-octane motor driving the economy at full tilt. Following on from his earlier projects, including Depois (2016), Rien (2012) and Ontem (2010), in Ballad of Today s Cepeda renews his intensity, grappling with reality, and his visual language becomes more precise, suffused with his own physical, emotional and social «constitution».

In this book, though even more tangibly in exhibitions, large-format images mark a caesura, or break. Together, artist and curator, artist and editor, thus structure the flow in the fields of images so that they read like an experiment in visual mapping or the unfolding of an unframed map. They form points of orientation, milestones, signposts, followed by the nimblest of steps, with heightened awareness and the ever-changing view of the photographer as he moves through place and time. At one point, without comment, he hones in on a sulphur-yellow Telamon; one of those larger-than life figures, like Atlas, or like a hunched caryatid supporting a certain architectural feature. In Greek mythology, Atlas bears the weight of the entire celestial heavens. Is the photographer, here, questioning his own work? Is he reflecting his present-day efforts in the mirror of history? The images suggest this.

This entire project revolves, time and again, around existence: the existence of the city, the people, and the photographer. This question of existentiality weaves its way through the pictures alternately like a gentle breeze, a strong headwind, or a sharp crosswind. In his visual and urban explorations, André Cepeda keeps asking himself: where am I now? What am I doing here? Who am I? And he also asks such things as: what is going on here? What is real, authentic, false? What is influencing who and when? In this respect, he follows in the footsteps of a great postwar photographic tradition in the spirit of such seekers of subjective reality, existence and truth as Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, Nan Goldin, Anders Petersen and others. Unlike, for instance, Ed van der Elsken, whose quest invariably drew the world’s attention to himself, André Cepeda holds back, and, in contrast to the explosive approach of some of his predecessors, treads very quietly through the world, constantly questioning, constantly seeking – looking for the tangible, the reliable, the real values in the real world, and the meaning of Being.

At almost precisely the midpoint of the book, in anodyne script, the words «I will never surrender» are scrawled on a roughly rendered pale orange wall. «I will never surrender» even if I have taken the wrong path, even if life occasionally has its ups and downs and is sometimes painful. This sense of resistance can also be felt in the energy-laden triptych of the last three images in the book: a distinctive black-and-white stairway full of darkness and light, leading down into the darkness just as it leads up to the light. / A wall painted bright orange in broad brushstrokes, jarring the senses. / A house facade with steps and window in «high key», in almost totally washed-out tones that illuminate the real in its pale whiteness. Torn from the shadows into the glaring light, as literary critic Brigitte Werneburg described her feelings on reading Paul Graham’s American Night. Pushed into the darkness, pulled into the light, exposed to brightness, by the closing scenes of André Cepeda’s book Ballad of Today. Perhaps so that we can see, read and understand it as a wake-up call to us as readers and observers. A wake-up call of reality? Of existence, of life, of resistance?