LIFE
FORCE
The magazine of the photo-essay
July 2017 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by Tito Mouraz
“For this photographer, landscape does not mean something one describes,
represents or witnesses, but a place which is inhabited by tension and where the
visible elements seem to invoke not only material presence, but also absences,
spirits and magic.”
Nuno Crespo
In the Beira-Alta region of Portugal, where Tito Mouraz was born and brought up,
there is a house that is said to be haunted by the ghosts of seven women, all maiden
sisters. One of them was a witch. On nights of the full moon, the women, in their
white gowns, would fly from their balcony over to the leafy branches of the chestnut
across the street. From there they would seduce men who passed-by.
Mouraz explores the myth of this place through raw, moody black and white images that capture the sense of the night,
the fumes, the moon, the sounds of the trees. It is an environment where the past resonates deeply and within which
the people portrayed seem attached, like trees, to the land in which they they live. BeiraAlta shaped Mouraz as a child
and through his persistent return he searches out the slow changes of time through the gradual aging and
transformation of a landscape.
