A suite of thirty-two photographs by Nozolino accompanied by thirty-two poems by Rui Baião, bone lonely is a
meditation on one of the most intense yet simultaneously subtle human states: loneliness. “A man stands in the middle
of destruction, feeling unbelievably lonely. He makes deaf images during his blind walks. Dwelling with thoughts about
the loss in all conflicts, the feeling that all systems fail and the certainty that nothing lasts forever. He wonders what
light shines in loneliness, what sounds come out of a moving body, what can fill the absence. He has no answers. He
sees silent panic, he hears reports on people, he smells the mould, he feels the flesh aging and he tastes the dry
saliva in his mouth. There seems to be no escape. He has a word pounding inside his head: resist, resist… bone
lonely.”
Paulo Nozolino was born in Lisbon in 1955, and lived in London and Paris before settling again in Portugal. He has
published numerous books, many of his photographs of travels in Europe, the Middle East, and North and South
America. The most well known of these are Penumbra (1996), including images made in Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt
and Mauritania, and Far Cry (2005).
bone lonely
von Paulo Nozolino
