Searching for the Origins of the Portuguese Waltzes

Intentions, Artistic Collaborator Helena Flores, Photographer

When I was born, in 1978, my father had recently departed on a cod fishing expedition. During those years, I grew up with the memory of his absence, away for six months to catch the favorite fish of the Portuguese in the distant waters of Canada and Greenland. The reunion between him and my young mother, with my older brother – a baby then, in her arms – at the end of September 1967, was immortalized in the final minutes of the 1968 National Geographic documentary, Lonely Dorymen: Portugal’s Men of the Sea. It was, therefore, with a mix of surprise and enormous pleasure, that I received the invitation from Canadian writer Richard Simas to develop a photographic essay to accompany his collection of chronicles on the connections between Portugal and Newfoundland, Searching for the Origins of the Portuguese Waltzes.

Knowing my photographic work is very much anchored, like my biographical connection, in the maritime culture and community that played a central role in Portugal’s 20th-century cod fishing saga, Richard Simas challenged me to create a set of photographs that could establish a parallel narrative while accompanying his own work. Reflecting now on the invitation, I find it curious that he chose to collaborate with the daughter of a former member of the crew of the Vila do Conde, a ship with the same name as my hometown. Ironically, on that same ship, another fisherman, a family friend and Canadian emigrant, José Carlos Eusébio, met the young Art Stoyles and enjoyed playing music with him. Did my father, by chance sometime in the 1960s, also meet that same street musician who, over time, gained a reputation in Newfoundland for playing Portuguese music?

In Portugal, the cod fishing era is still ingrained in the memory of the former cod fishermen. Many of them recall the streets of St. John’s where I tried to capture some of those memories in 2015, when I was photographing a documentary production about this transatlantic relationship. Some men remembered Art Stoyles and his accordion, the night journeys to the dance halls on the hillside, or simple details such as a hot bath and the evening gatherings at the Fisherman’s House, long since closed. Cherished recollections of a city and port that offered rest and shelter from storms at sea.

On this side of the Atlantic, such cultural heritage is preserved at the Maritime Museum in Ílhavo where we can immerse ourselves in that reality. There, touching the water of a codfish aquarium transports us to the cold atmosphere of the Grand Banks, and, eye to eye, we meet the much-desired fish that inspired us, then, as a source of nutritional and economic wealth, and that still moves us, for the cultural richness it bequeathed us. My question is, then, how to evoke these elements in a photographic essay: those who hold memories of time and place? And what of the fish themselves, the motto of this heritage?

I found the answer in Nos Mares Do Fim Do Mundo (In the Seas of the End of the World), an intimate and poetic travel diary by Bernardo Santareno, a medical doctor who, while working on the cod fishing fleet in 1957 and 1958, met and treated my own family members. His work pushed me towards the idea of photographing underwater, inspired by one particularly intense chronicle, called “O Sonho”:

Corria pelo fundo do mar, livre, respirando sem qualquer

esforço: apanhava flores lindíssimas, jamais admiradas antes, e

escolhia conchas, azuis ou róseas, de formas encantadoramente

bizarras. Sentia-se leve e feliz.

E quando, por acaso, se mirou numa estrela de oiro que,

cadente, lhe passava em face do rosto, ficou estupefacto: era muito

mais jovem, agora.