Beauty is blind and distant

Herberto Helder and photography

Abstract

Photography, as a metaphor for the construction of images, constitutes one of the structuring nodes of the visible field and its opacity in Herberto Helder's poetry. Based on his books Retrato em Movimento, Kodak, and the poem “Retratíssimo ou narração / de um homem depois de maio”, an articulation between photography and poetry in Herberto Helder will be examined, so as to explain the link between fixed images and moving words. Photograph will be thought of as a metaphor that produces the poem, showing what dissipates into image. Theories of photography and image by Derrida, Barthes and Blanchot will be approximated to Helder's poems, in order to establish the reformulation of the thought of photographic image in poetry. Finally, the categories of visibility and opacity will be delimited, through which a game between presence and absence is structured, reminding us that “A beleza é cega e afastada”. (Helder, 1973, p.166).