Tatiane Ertel
Viva o Clique Magazine is born from the strength of a community already united by the act of sharing images and ideas.
What began as a collaborative project has grown into a magazine, without losing the poetic and critical essence that has always set it apart.
This is a space for photographers, artists, and readers who believe in the power of the gaze and in the dialogue between visual arts and words.
An international platform, built in collaboration, dedicated to broadening horizons and affirming photography and art as living fields of thought.
Each edition is crafted with care, giving room both to established
names and to emerging voices.
More than following trends, the magazine seeks depth and permanence, cultivating a fertile ground where creation meets reflection, and where every reader
can feel part of a community in motion.
Viva o Clique is founded and curated by Angela Rosana, journalist, photographer, and visual artist.
Her poetic and critical vision sustains the project, expanding it into an international dialogue on photography and the arts.
Articles on Photography and the Arts
Showcasing Professional and Artistic Photography
In Conversation
Conversations on Photography and Contemporary Art
November 2025
The Real in Question
Photograph by Luís Martins Pisco / Courtesy of the artist.
A conversation with Luís Martins Pisco on authorship, ethics, and the unseen within contemporary images.
We live in a time when any image can be born from a command. In this context, photography once again faces questions about its own nature. What truly distinguishes it from an image created by an algorithm? What still depends on the gaze, on presence, on time itself? Portuguese photographer Luís Martins Pisco, has lived and worked in Porto since 2001.
Trained in Anthropology, with a background in heritage and museology, he has built a body of work that moves between observation and
memory, reflecting on the transformations of the contemporary urban and social landscape. Through series such as À Rasca / What a Fool I Am and More Pictures about Dark Cities and Vacant Buildings, Pisco explores the sensitive territory where document and poetics intertwine.In this interview, conducted by Angela Rosana for Viva o Clique Magazine, Pisco reflects on the ethics of the image, authorship, and the place of photography in a time when the real seems to yield ground to simulation.
In your view, what still distinguishes photography from other forms of visual creation, especially now that the “human gaze” itself can be simulated?
I believe that the physical presence of the photographer before their subject is what distinguishes photography from other forms of visual creation. Photography requires a concrete foundation. It depends on a reality, whether spontaneous or staged, that existed in a specific moment and place. Without physical presence, there is no photograph in the true sense of the word. However filtered the photographer’s gaze and testimony may be through their choices, as I mentioned earlier, what makes photography unique is precisely this combination of witnessed reality and the subjective interpretation of the one who was there. It is this direct connection between creativity, perception, technique, and testimony that continues to set photography apart, as well as other forms of visual creation, from images generated by artificial intelligence, which emerge from descriptions, algorithms, and databases.
Photography has always existed in tension between reality and interpretation.
What changes when reality is no longer a prerequisite for the image?
Reality is not a precondition for the creation of images. It never was. But it is a condition for the making of a photograph. That is why the invention of photography in the nineteenth century represented a true revolution in the way images were produced. The mechanization of the portrait-making process was considered a superior form of representing reality, a faithful and objective portrait of an individual, free from the subjectivities and interferences of the traditional artistic gaze. At that time, photography was believed not to lie; it was regarded as visual proof of reality, a mirror of the individual and of their personality as they truly were.
However, as John Berger points out in Ways of Seeing, photography is never a purely mechanical process. However spontaneous or casual a photograph may appear, there is always an intention and a choice. The selection of a frame, what is left out and what is included and emphasized, the choice of background, the subject’s pose, beyond merely technical aspects such as lighting, shutter speeds, apertures, focal lengths, everything is a choice, and every choice influences the final result of the photograph.
“Photography is grounded in a concrete reality
that existed in a specific moment and place.”
Many argue that AI is just another tool, much like the digital camera or Photoshop once were. Do you think that comparison is fair?
The comparison may make sense when AI is used as a support tool in image editing, much like what happens today with many editing software programs. In such cases, it works as an optimization of previous tools and can be regarded as another technical resource available to the photographer.
However, there is a fundamental difference that should not be ignored. With the arrival of digital photography, debates emerged in which it was common to hear questions such as “Is this photograph film or digital?” There was often a certain nostalgia associated with analog, as if only film could represent true photography. From another perspective, many amateurs began to advocate for the idea of pure photography, unedited and tied to an idealized notion of authenticity.What is often forgotten is that manipulation, montage, and post-production in photography are almost as old as photography itself.
Photoshop, for example, merely accelerated and democratized processes that were already being carried out in the darkroom, such as cutting, layering, retouching, and manipulating light and contrast. The digital camera, in turn, did not alter the fundamental principle of photography: it remains an optical device that captures the light reflected by a real object. What changed was the medium on which the image is recorded, as well as the democratization of photographic practice.
Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, can generate entire images without any contact with reality. There is not necessarily a photographer present, nor a real object being photographed. In that sense, we are speaking of something that goes far beyond a tool for editing or recording. It represents a paradigm shift in image creation. Testimony, experience, and physical presence at the moment of capture cease to exist, elements that have always defined photographic practice.
Therefore, I do not consider the comparison between AI and tools such as the digital camera or Photoshop to be entirely fair.
Manipulation has always been part of photography: it can lie in framing, in the choice of light, in exposure time, or in the editing that interprets reality. Yet there is a point at which intervention ceases to be translation and becomes invention. In your view, where does that boundary shift or dissolve?
I believe that with the emergence of artificial intelligence, that boundary has dissolved. We have moved from the interpretation of reality to its invention. We are no longer debating, as has often been the case in photojournalism, whether a photograph was manipulated to convey emotion or to make a narrative more dramatic. In the realm of commercial photography, we accept that an image is not a faithful mirror of the world but an idealized version shaped by the author’s creativity and skill.
With AI, however, the scenario is different. We are dealing with a kind of visual fiction generated by algorithms.
What troubles me is not the use of AI itself but the visual illiteracy that prevails on social media. In the frantic pursuit of views and likes, it is not uncommon to find people calling themselves photographers while publishing AI-generated images without any mention of their process of creation. More than a technological or aesthetic issue, this is an ethical one.
In your work, there is a persistent gaze upon the city, time, and human and social transformations. Does this attention to what changes and what endures find resonance in the discussion about what is real and what is fabricated?
Honestly, I never thought much about that. This discussion arose after noticing the publication of several images whose authors did not mention they had been created using artificial intelligence. I believe none of that relates to my photographic practice, which I like to describe as a personal diary. Since an early age, I have always loved looking at photographs and grew up fascinated by family albums. Later, I began photographing as a form of personal expression. I usually carry a camera with me, even if days go by without taking a single photograph, either because nothing captures my attention or I simply don’t feel like it.
During the COVID lockdowns, I began organizing my archive and realized its potential as both a personal and family memory. And yes, considering that I photographed my daily paths for years, I found within them the traces of social and urban transformation. Delving into that personal archive felt like reliving the past. Since then, I have photographed as one writes a diary, and I have been compiling these black-and-white images in the series More Pictures about Dark Cities and Vacant Buildings and color ones in the postcard collection Another Porto. Occasionally, I photograph with a pre-defined project and purpose, as in the series dedicated to creative processes such as Urban Sketching, Céu or An Evening with the Gran Morsa, and others where I document events like What Fool I Am / À Rasca, Silent Screams, The Devil on the Loose, and more recently The Devil’s Bridge, which I have published in zines through Cobalt Blue Press, which also welcomes submissions from other authors.
I always follow the impulse to look and photograph without a predefined plan. I keep the photographs in “quarantine” before revisiting them with a fresher and more detached gaze. Organization and sequencing come later, often inspired by a reading or a song. Perhaps that is why I have never thought of my photographs as a “body of work” in the formal artistic sense. I prefer to see them as a personal diary, a way of relating to the world, of preserving memory, so I do not forget.
“We have moved from the interpretation of reality to its invention.”
And finally, do you believe there is still something essentially photographic, something that endures even when everything seems capable of becoming a photograph?
Despite the growing artificiality in image production, we are simultaneously witnessing a search for authenticity. Although digital processes offer countless advantages, the past few years have brought a renewed appreciation for photography as a material practice. This can be seen in the increasing number of self-published photo books and zines, in the resurgence of analog photography, in the release of new film cameras, and in the rise of communities dedicated to large-format photography.
Nostalgia for the past, as a counterpoint to an
uncertain future, seems to sustain this reaction to the superficiality that dominates the thousands of photographs shared on social media.As photographer Yusuke Nagata noted in an article published in DES_Photomag, it is necessary to rethink the place of photography in the digital age. Photography demands intentionality. It requires time and discipline. It involves going out every day with a camera, observing the world attentively, selecting images, organizing visual sequences with aesthetic or narrative purpose, printing photographs to frame, compiling them into albums, giving them as gifts, creating postcards, or publishing zines. In other words, the photographic act does not end with capture or editing, but continues in the way the image is shared and materialized.
À Rasca / What a Fool I Am
The The Devil's Bridge
More Pictures about Dark Cities and Vacant Buildings
In Luís Martins Pisco’s work, photography holds time still and restores to the image the weight of presence.
Each photograph extends the instant and returns to the gaze a sense of matter.
The real reappears, discreet yet complete, as if it were still possible to believe in light.
Photography by Luís Martins Pisco
Featured Story
October 2025
In moments when silence meets resilience, the image becomes both witness and voice
Photographs by Aline Evelin
Original project and content generously shared by the author
Curatorial text and editorial adaptation by Angela Rosana, for Viva o Clique Magazine
Published with the author’s permission
Heroes in the Mud
A Poignant Portrait of the Floods
in Southern Brazil
Photos by Aline Evelin
In the southern region of Brazil, the state of Rio Grande do Sul was overtaken by the waters, leaving behind a landscape of silence and loss.
Amid ruins and submerged memories, photographer Aline Evelin transformed collective despair into a poetic act of resistance, documenting not only destruction but the quiet gestures of survival.
Heroes in the Mud brings together images and words that pay tribute to those who lost everything, yet still
stood tall.
Through her lens, despair becomes tenderness, and the mud, once a symbol of tragedy, turns into a mirror of resilience.
A visual and emotional testament to the hope that insists on emerging even where the ground seems to have been
washed away.