P4Photography is pleased to announce the release of the Pherographia book, by Carlos M. Fernandes . This is the most perennial of the activities taking place at place at P4Photography on the concept with the same name, during November and December of 2008. The release coincides with the opening of the exhibition Timor Mortis Conturbat Me , at P4ArtGallery, a show in which, to the extent of our knowledge, pherographia is for the first time used outside a scientific framework. Along with the exhibition, P4 announces an on-line auction of a set of pherographs made after some photos carefully chosen from Carlos M. Fernandes personal archives. A website ( www.pherographia.com ) dedicated to this theme is also on the way.

This book is much more than a catalog of the exhibition Timor Mortis Conturbat Me . It provides the reader with a general view on the concept of pherographia and on also on the Artificial Art hypothesis, an emerging discipline where Arts and Sciences come together. Leonel Moura − the renowned Portuguese artist that is exploring for several years this fascinating new world − wrote the foreword and contributed with his own view of the Artificial Life prospect. This first edition is limited to 100 numbered books, and each one can be personalized by the buyer with his own pherographic portrait, made by Carlos M. Fernandes and P4Photography.

P4 Team

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When a friend of a mine phoned me one Saturday morning, more than ten years ago, asking me if I wanted him to buy us a box of negatives that was on sale in a flea market (by that time we had the illusion we could create some work together, against the odds that tell us that collective creation is the exception, not a rule), most of them showing people in "ID photo" poses, I could not imagine that they would end up in a gallery wall transfigured by the action of artificial ants. Throughout the years, since we bought that huge box, I looked at those negatives many times. I classified them, separated men from women, and children from adults. (There was even enough material to gather military and police officers in a case of their own.) I was experiencing again the urge to collect. I imagined how they lived and how (or if) they had died. I had this unsettling notion that the older the person in the photo, the lesser the probability of them still being amongst the living. However, the negatives gradually fell into oblivion. They got older inside the improvised small boxes.   (Like people, photographs age, and sometimes die.) The smell of fixer invaded the room whenever I opened them, as if it was the formaldehyde of dead photos. But I never gave up trying to resurrect those faces.

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Carlos M. Fernandes (about Timor Mortis Conturbat Me ), in Pherographia