Henri Prestes made his photographs in the cold months, walking at night through the villages, mountains, and empty fields around his Portuguese hometown. The result, gathered in his first monograph, is a body of landscape work in which the human presence is mostly implied: a lit window, a road, weather moving across a hillside. Setanta Books published We Were Born Before the Wind in 2022 as a 112-page hardcover at 23 by 28 centimetres, holding fifty images. Prestes works in a fine-art mode, and the publisher describes his subject as solitude and melancholy in a landscape that is at once mysterious and specific.
The book’s distinguishing feature is the atmosphere Prestes sustains across a sequence. His night scenes are cinematic without being staged narrative; the quiet of the smallest hours carries something ominous and, at the same time, calming. That double quality is difficult to hold for fifty pictures, and it is what the book asks the reader to sit with. The title’s reach toward wind and weather suggests the scale against which these small, lit moments are set.
For a collector, the interest lies in the coherence of the project rather than in claims about scarcity. This is a first monograph, which fixes a photographer’s early position, and it is a considered physical object: two different paper stocks are used inside, a decision that affects how the night tones and the quieter passages are read. Prestes has exhibited in the UK, US, Portugal, and Spain, and his awards include a 2021 ADC Gold Cube and Bronze Cubes in 2020 and 2022. Those facts describe a practice already in public view; the book is where its landscape argument is made at length.
What remains after a first reading is less a single image than a climate: darkness, distance, and a patient attention to places after everyone has gone inside. Setanta has built a list around photography books of this temperament, and Prestes’s contribution belongs to it on the strength of the work itself.
