Colectivo Salitre: In photography and surfing, paper is eternity | Books

It’s a summer day in Carcavelos, the beach is full of bathers, boards are lined up right there, surfers’ dreams and choreographies flow through the water, just as they do at the table on our terrace. But here, our board is a book and it is on it that we surf an immense sea. André Carvalho, surfer-photographer and mentor of this Saltpeter, now in its third volume, shows us details of this entire country by the sea. In the undulation of the pages, and in André’s eyes, waves break, surfers jump. We feel the images on our fingers, we smell the oil of the impression, and, through the power of the sea and our imagination, we really feel the saltpeter.

“We were in the pandemic and I was tired of doing slideshows for the hell of Instagram”, says André, mentor of this “passion” and “adventure” (arduous, let’s say) which is to produce a book on paper, “hardcover, good paper, good photographs, good printing”, for “eternalize” “surfing in its pure state”. He grew up with photography (his father is photojournalist Luiz Carvalho), graduated in graphic design and, of course, did and still does a lot of surfing. I would start taking photos snowboardinglater publishing in surf magazines, was the photographer chosen in 2014 to accompany Garrett McNamara, he would later launch a travel photography book, Sailing is necessary. She had the animal and the love for the role.

“I don’t believe that digital will replace this eternity”, says André, 48 years old, at a time when the networks are “flooded by millions of images of surf and sea”. But it’s all too fast. “There are photographs here that have to be printed to appreciate the details”, he argues, being also the pager and designer from the book. As there are no longer paper surf magazines in the country, this search for the physical eternity of the seemingly fleeting moment led him to join a collective, which also goes by the name of Salitre, with great photographers in the area, “each with their own personality” , and spread across the country: he, who lives along the Cascais Line, with hops to the Alentejo coast, “the Breck [João Bracourt]which is in the Algarve, Pedro Mestre, in Ericeira, Hélio António in Nazaré, Tó Mané [que se celebrizou mundialmente com uma grande onda de McNamara], by Porto. But sometimes we get into each other’s zones”, smiles André.

Everyone’s perspectives are also different. If André always keeps an eye on surfers, Hélio António, 45, who joins the conversation, is fascinated by the wave. Free surfer Having become a photographer, he confesses to being obsessed with the “perfect wave breaking with beautiful light, atmosphere, context”. “My focus was simply on the wave, my photography was based on that principle”, he says. “What I want to capture is that whoever sees that image thinks ‘I should have been there that day’. It’s that feeling he had in the past when he was leafing through a magazine, ‘hey, what a great wave, I wish I had surfed it’”, he concludes.

Remembering that many of those who buy the book “are not even surfers, they are people with a passion for the sea”, Hélio argues that “going from digital to paper” is the ultimate pleasure: “We all have photos dying on our hard drives, but when you go for printing is the culmination of our work.”

Each volume of Saltpeter it has become a yearbook, a guardian of memories of the sea and surfing, its people, its culture, its lifestyle. It is “the only paper surf publication in Portugal, and in Europe there are only three”. In 2021, the first volume was released under the theme Salitre, followed by Freedom and Resilience, each with a circulation of 1700 copies.

Resilience, in this case, post-pandemic, is applied both to the life of the sea and photography, and to the publication itself. “We didn’t have a sponsor”, says André, and this at a time when production costs “increased drastically”, frustrated both by the lack of support and by some lack of interest among the younger generations. “The generation over 30 gives a lot of value, but young people live inside the digital bubble”, he laments.

But they don’t give up: the fourth volume of Saltpeter it is a growing wave, with the collective’s photographers recording “the eternity of the salty gaze”, which will reach us in autumn, “against winds and tides”. A future edition that, they hope, will be more multimedia, with other complements to printed photography: “We would like to create podcasts and the photos in the book have QR codes: you click and you can hear a narrative around the photo, a conversation, or watch a short video of that wave.” But always with the printed book as a pillar, because in this Saltpeter the photos really are waves on our fingers and in our eyes.