Inês Valente (@inesrvalente), born in 1993 in Avanca (Aveiro), Portugal. Photographer and visual artist. Studies at the Instituto Português de Fotografía in Porto between 2016 and 2018. “Maria Azul” is her principal project aiming to promote cyanotype and other alternative photographic printing processes.
Since 2020 she has been providing training on different photographic techniques, being cyanotype the main focus. Her photographs have been part of group exhibitions both in Portugal and abroad, in Barcelona, Munich and Skopje, and have also been published in several magazines, such as Lomography Magazine, The Hand, Float, SHOTS, among others. In 2024, she won first price in Aveiro Jovem Criador 2024 contest, with the project called Reverie.
“You had to be there” is a set of 8 polaroids, a complete package, taken during my time in El Hacedor, which were 8 days. They represent not only the ruins of several places I visit, but also the ruined pictures themselves. My polaroid camera was my first camera, which was given to me for my 8th birthday by my father and now, 23 years later, I used it for experimental photography. When I knew about the central theme “ruins” I immediately thought about my ruined photos as a starting point. The title of this project was given by the file that comes with each roll of film and is also part of the work. For me it’s exactly that: for you to see, for you to understand, you had to be there. These photos represent my time spent in those places. If you want to understand and comprehend the ruins in its context, you had to be there. The final presentation is a frame representing a window, with all pictures hanging inside: a viewpoint to the ruined places but also a part of a house. You can look at those pictures and imagine, but to truly feel it, you had to be there.
The other project was for Silvestris Festival. I took some stones of the ruins of Bárcena de Bureba and printed cyanotypes from leaves on them and then reintegrated those stones back in the ruins. The idea was to print the nature that surrounded that place in the walls of those houses and to bring light to the village. Bárcena was abandoned mainly because of the absence of electricity. Cyanotype is an alternative photo process that use sunlight as a way to print the images. I called the project “magic stones”: its unusual colour and the idea of bringing light to a village that was abandoned because the lack of it, has its own magic.
Rural Apocalypse 