Lily Sverner: No haste when looking

The exhibition No haste when looking, by Lily Sverner, presents photographs taken between 1980 and the middle of the first decade of this millennium, on different days and different territories. On the whole, we encounter a recurring theme: the interruption of an action at a given instant, if it were not for the picture, it would be almost imperceptible to the naked eye .

Lily Sverner photography has the desire to eternalize itself in a photograph, as analyzes the curator, researcher of photography Rubens Fernandes Junior. This might seem redundant, but according to him, but few are those who manage to have tranquility to create images with such singularity. “She does not have the intention of recording a pure time, but, as Octávio Paz reminds us, only that time which we translate as “the immediate imminence of the present moment”. And this seems to me to be essential in these photographs”, he concludes. Lily Sverner began photographing during a phase of her life when her family situation had changed and, recognizing the need for a more creative dimension to her existence, she acquired a camera and was learning to shoot. She became increasingly absorbed by the activity not only producing her images but also exposing and publishing the work of other photographers. “Each of her photographs seems much more like a continuous flux of remembrances lived with intensity. Her sharp eye cuts across men’s everyday life and puts into evidence her desire of transforming that moment of intense complicity into a photograph.”, says the curator. To Lily Sverner, photography has become a fantastic tool to exalt whatever arises and disappears at the incredible speed of daily life. We resort to Marcel Proust, who in the classic Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouvé) reminds us that “an image presented to us by life brings with it, in a single moment, sensations which are in fact multiple and heterogeneous. (…) An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelope us simultaneously with them.”