Pathêmes

Pathêmes is the first monograph from artist Marcelo Gomes. The Brazilian-born photographer has edited a body of work that spans almost a decade into a visual-poetic sequence that distorts and blurs the conventions of the photo book. Unbound and built upon a thoughtful and surprising use of papers, textures, and narrative disjunctions, the book itself mirrors Gomes’ own documentation of the everyday – casual, dreamy and, almost always, between. The impact of these images lands with soft dissolution, leaving a faint, nostalgic record of his travels, trips spent in pursuit of the jubilant and the intimate in locales as far-flung as Nicaragua, New Zealand, his native Brazil, Brussels, New York City, and Rome. Taken as a whole, Gomes’ 280-page monograph is a reminder, as writer Durga Chew-Bose notes in her introductory essay, “that so much of seeing is actually about standing back, looking out, and remembering to make use of our neck.”