What really interests me, my true passion is the contact, the extreme proximity, the availability to let me in, to speak to me, to show me how you live, what kinds of things you hang on your bedroom walls, where you make your sausages, how you make your bread. Photographing, in my case, is engaging in a subtle dance with a subject: me, a stranger, intruder, hopping around with a camera, high and low, choosing the magic moment while the subject chooses what he or she wants to give me. It is most of the time, a spontaneous, unspoken contract. Finding that moment requires the involvement of my totality, my interests, emotionality, references and influences.

I was born in Angola, Africa in 1959, an Officer’s son. I spent my early years under the Fascist Dictatorship of Salazar in Portugal before finding myself living in Hammond, Louisiana, thanks to a scholarship to college, at age of 18. Having grown in the monolithic culture of 60’s Portugal, I was always very curious about other cultures, and my photography work is the history of my interaction with persons of those “other” cultures, including my own Portuguese, to which, after almost 40 years away I have also become foreign. I’m like an ambassador of my nation of one, negotiating moments with whomever triggers me to press the button.

Years before I picked up the camera at 30 years of age, I was being introduced to photography by my own accord mainly through magazines, first in fashion, where photographers with strong structural composition, motion, storytelling and dramatic contrast caught my attention. Lillian Bassman’s poetic, romantic drama, Albert Watson ’s dark portraits and Irving Penn’s classicism were early influences.

In the 80’s and 90’s, I was selling furniture door to door in the African American rural areas north of New Orleans, having incredible one on one experiences, but I was not photographing them. Those years gave me the ability to sustain rejection and to get me in the door, qualities that are crucial to my photographic work. In natural progression, I started to look at documentary. Walker Evans became a huge influence by how he got in and documented people’s private spaces in the dust bowl of the 30’s. I often subconsciously try to marry that with Henri Cartier Bresson’s sense of the moment and with William Klein’s notes of fashion, movement, and the use of wide angle lenses to get very close and touch the subject giving the feeling that you’re there.

My early years of photography were in Fashion. It was a torrid love affair fueled by an exaggerated romantic view of that space, influenced by the great photographers’ work I had devoured: Horst, Avedon, Hellen Von Unwerth,  Meisel, LaChapelle, Skrebneski, so many… Progressing from building my portfolio into the cold world of actually doing professional work, I gradually became disillusioned and the thrill was gone. 15 years later, as a documentary photographer, I had a chance of diving back into the doldrums of fashion, this time as an outsider with all the freedom in the world, unconstrained by anyone’s ideas, egos, commercial viability, focusing my lens with glee into the inconsistencies, hypocrisy, hurt, devastation but also beauty that years earlier I had felt. That was of great interest to me. It was sort of a mild revenge! I was given unfettered access to photograph the behind-the-scenes of Lisbon Fashion Week sometimes like a fly in the wall, other times like a tiger about to pounce.This resulted in my project “Moda Lisboa” which could be described cynically beautiful, and it always talked about something. To my amazement, I was invited for the following year, and the images ended up at MUDE, Lisbon’s design and fashion museum.