Your co-star: Lisbon!
“Wherever you point your camera, Lisbon is visually exciting.” This was how Fred Schepisi, the Australian film director, described the city where he made much of The Russia House, a 1990 John le Carré spy thriller starring Sean Connery.
Many other artists, filmmakers and photographers have been similarly captivated by Lisbon, where the acclaimed German director Wim Wenders has made three films in which the city itself is a leading protagonist. They are attracted in part by the special quality of light in Lisbon. Scientists point to a unique alignment of factors, including topography, air quality and the warm colours of the buildings, to explain this phenomenon. Whatever the causes, the effect is magical. The special light that Lisbon bathes in is partly reflected from the Tagus, the river that runs through the heart of the city and the lives of the people who live there. They travel across it. They work, stroll and eat alongside it. They fish in it, write novels about it, conduct love affairs beside it.
When the sun lowers, a sheen of reflected light turns the river near the Vasco da Gama bridge to a glimmering pale gold, creating the illusion of what the Portuguese call the Mar da Palha, or sea of straw. The shimmer of this reflected light lends Lisbon an insubstantial, evanescent quality.
Its white walls, church domes and tiered roofs seem to float on the water like a Turner painting, as if the city had evolved the power of vanishing into the river’s mists and reflections.
To photograph or be photographed in, Lisbon is a city with few equals.
To photograph or be photographed in, Lisbon is a city with few equals.
