Title: Casa das Sete Senhoras / The House of the Seven Women
Artist: Tito Mouraz
Designer: Sérgio Couto
Editor: Dewi Lewis Publishing
Texts: Nuno Crespo & Tito Mouraz
Printer: Maia Douro, Porto, Portugal
Publication date and place: July, 2016 / Porto, Portugal
Edition: 650
Format, binding: Hardcover, perfect bound with cold glue
Size: 24 x 30 cm
Number of pages and images: 108 pages, 55 tritone plates
Type of printing and paper: Offset
Retail price: 38 eur
Book Description:
(…) for this photographer, landscape does not mean something one describes, represents or witnesses, but a place which is inhabited by tension and where the visible elements seem to invoke not only material presence, but also absences, spirits and magic.
Nuno Crespo
In the Beira-Alta region of Portugal, where Tito Mouraz was born and brought up, there is a house that is said to be haunted by the ghosts of seven women, all maiden sisters. One of them was a witch. On nights of the full moon, the women, in their white gowns, would fly from their balcony over to the leafy branches of the chestnut across the street. From there they would seduce men who passed-by.
Mouraz explores the myth of this place through raw, moody black and white images that capture the sense of the night, the fumes, the moon, the sounds of the trees. It is an environment where the past resonates deeply and within which the people portrayed seem attached, like trees, to the land in which they they live. Beira-Alta shaped Mouraz as a child and through his persistent return he searches out the slow changes of time through the gradual aging and transformation of a landscape.
Book Soundtrack:
- Title: The House of Seven Women