Portraits

I started in photography trying to emulate Sebastiao Salgado. He was my main reference back then as long as most of Magnum pioneers. I wanted to follow the documentarist "fly on the wall" approach with no intervention at all to the world that I was photographing. Some years went on and I slowly started to incorporate other elements to my photography until I embraced the portrait and all it's endless possibilities. Now I could create my own light instead of always relying in whatever was there and I loved it. I still love to work on pure documentary photography but what happens a lot is that I blend moth languages. Take "the fighter" portrait as an example. It's a real fighter. He's not an actor or a model. He was fighting in a boxing tournament in Brazil and I set up the white background with studio light by the ring so whenever the fighters would leave the ring after the fight I would ask them to pose for me so I could capture the sweat the expression of victory or loss. Even though it's studio lights and he's posing, we still get a lot of the elements that make photojournalism so exciting: that little chunk of real life that now we can encapsulate and contemplate as it had it's own meaning.