< TextsSelva Oscura
Selva Oscura
This is not the type of images usually associated with photography as a diaristic practice, images of people, events and places. But, all things considered, these are images of people, events and places. Places whose geography is less interesting than the condition of an encounter of the photographer with himself; places that coincide with the image as a plan. Purely visual events that are the occasions of that meeting. Images of a subjectivity that fights the battle of adult life and that contain in themselves (outside of the plan? No, in the shape itself) the human depth of the mimetic twist of things.
The “The Democratic Forest” of William Eggleston found in this series by Tito Mouraz a somber development, borrowed from Dante Alighieri: “Midway upon the journey of our life, / I found myself within a jungle dark, / for the straightforward pathway had been lost”.
These are excerpts from the diary of a restless gaze that searches for a path through the dark jungle of the present: of the exterior circle as well as the inner circle, the dark jungle of reality and real life. Excerpts that point in the direction of an analogy between the general situation of the artist that always moves forward in a sort of darkness, finding himself by trial and error, and the helplessness of an adult faced with the tortuosity of one’s whole life. They are, literally, annotations of the daily life of a photographer momentarily strayed by the vicissitudes of long-term photography; the daily life of the gaze restlessly describing itself or finding itself in the world.
Therefore, here we see the questioning of one’s own artistic practice (metaphorised in retrospect) or a contemplation about the shape of one’s own path, or, if you prefer, about the path of the shape.
Tito Mouraz ironizes about the instability of the straightforward path, or about its’ bumpy and metastable nature, ironizes about what we still consider the straight path despite all the missteps, twits and compromises. Focusing on a series of breaks, false starts, dead ends, aporias, he reflects about acceptance of the damage caused by contingence, about the idealized purity of the form, that has already been abandoned simply by virtue of idealization.
And so, upon the bend of the trail, can we question which path the gaze chooses and which one gazes back; will he choose the twisted or the straight way? Will he continue in the dark, on the drawing of the curve, helpless, searching for light, upon the mysterious life that opens in front?
Tito Mouraz reflects here about life as misplacement and as surprise, and about photography as a mental thread that guides him (that guides us) through a labyrinth shaped like malposition, obscurity and lack of shape.
These are images that say goodbye to youth, that deal with hope. Hope in understanding oneself in the forest of existence. The implicit and often misunderstood hope of carrying the camera with him, wherever he goes; in being, whenever and wherever he is, ready for the beautiful, the anomalous, the interesting. A document of the photographer’s hope about photographic practice as a compass for the selva oscura, for the soul’s wasteland.
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and Humberto Brito
october, 2025