I was born in the village of Alvarães (Viana do Castelo, Portugal) in 1961. I graduated with an Architecture degree in between the Escola Superior de Belas Artes (School of Fine Arts) and the University of Porto. I am an architect and professor in the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, where I am the teacher of the 3rd year subject of design studio. My research interests are centered in the spatial devices of the house, in the relationship between culture and ways of living, in the programs of public housing and, currently, in the development of an approach to “inclusive architecture” that encompasses themes like ageing and sustainability.

1

Within this framework, when I think of photography, inevitably I think like a photographer-architect. Not because architecture is my point of departure or the theme of my photographic work, but because I can not escape my education and activity as an architect, that have shaped my way of thinking, looking and working. On the other hand, other art forms intertwine with my photographic work, such as painting, drawing, writing or music – in a kind of stream of consciousness – marking a fragmentation where the experimentation with other types of image stands out. This background also predisposes me for a certain way of looking at the work and writings of the other photographers. It concerns not only studying the voice of others, that is, their technique, but, mainly, reflecting on my own voice and, specially, reflecting about what is my own voice amongst the voice of others. As such, writing gains a relevant space… reading and writing become indissociable of the photographic doing.

You could say that this way of approaching photography is marked by an academic bias, which by being inevitable, also shapes my work. Certainly, it also constitutes a limitation! But I wouldn’t be capable, like Guido Guidi says, of stop looking through the viewfinder, of renunciating the control of the organization of the image, of allowing that the photography realizes itself before the image is apprehended by an excessively structured and rhetorical thought.[1] This idea entices me – one of a velocity necessary for execution, centered in the essential –, but I look to balance it with the argument of Luigi Ghiri, for whom photography should contain the possibility of clarifying its own processes of formation.

2

At this departure point, what interests me is photography as a series, sequency or group, that links one image to another like a process of formation and passage of the senses. This process initiates a knowing, for example, by joining two images, that seeks to enlarge the significative hypothesis beyond the ones that each single image carries. This circulation of meanings examines the fact that photography is a subjective and mediated representation, that only within each of us, facing the image, acquires meaning.

Thus, when two images are placed side by side, or when photography and music intrude, the photographic process of an idea initiates, that orients the following steps in the elaboration, definition and redefinition of the photographic work. I can say that I am not interested in an isolated photograph, but in the group to which it belongs – a succession of works that juxtapose and interfere between themselves,[2] in the long lifespan of a work that seeks to “realize its own potentialities within its own limitations”.[3]

3

So, it interests me what has been conventionally named as banal photography, precisely for its possibility of opening itself to the retelling (to narrate again) and to the displacement of meanings. Banal photography – that moves away from singular beauty which captivates and suffocates – is not interesting in itself and, in a certain way, it’s also not mine, but a fertile field of everyone. It is in this sense that banal photography can speak of something broader than that in which it is framed.[4]

It is this characteristic that conduces the existence of layers of meaning in my work, opening passages between them like hypotheses of clarification of what I am doing. But, in the end, I consider photography an autonomous medium, its own language for the act of looking, that, to be validated, it needs to load the spectator with the comprehension of the gears specific of the functioning of the image.[5] In other words, the processes and work contexts should be taken as lateral to the image, perhaps mere supports for the construction of a photography, of an argument, or for critical reading, but that rest at the door when we enter a photography.[6]

4

My photographic process is slow, unravelling itself in diverse moments and, sometimes, distant in time. The work is not organized in a linear form, but instead in overlayers and unfoldings, in a back and forth motion between attempts and its verification. For example, after photographing, I resort to drawing and writing, to the construction of panels with photocopied images and to the photographic printing in different scales, densities, and types of paper, in order to interrogate the produced photographs – how were they constructed ? or, how do they get closer ? – and confront them with the restlessness with which life passes through me.

This way of working, in part, stems from my old routine of keeping and juxtaposing material and immaterial objects that, later on, I hope they can surprise me. Here, it gathers particular importance the constant return to the photographic work already achieved, to relook and reconstruct it. In special, the return to the photographic archive, where I find, in images once abandoned or considered failed, clues of other understandings, that open new inquiries about the ongoing works and give room for others to come.

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These processes allow me to question the conventional role of memory in the scope of the photographic image and project. Could photography be reduced to a memory sense-object?[7]

The photography that I do is an artifact which does not seek to represent nothing beyond my own relationship with reality[8] – for this reason, it is closer to abstraction than a determined program. It doesn’t have, in this sense, nothing to say when the image shows us the ground, the sky, a path or a tree… However, what can offer wider interest in this position, as a form of continued engagement of photography with the context of visible, resides precisely in what is contingently excluded of the possibility of being seen and represented.[9]

Porto, July 6th, 2025