The Walk. From Lisbon to Lisbon

2011 - 2016

The act of documenting life on the street is charged with a dichotomy between the detachment and the connection it provides with the spaces and subjects with whom one shares the sidewalk. On the one hand, the photographer stays out of the scene, acknowledging his transient condition in the ow of the street. On the other hand, the photographic process demands a greater connection, forcing the observer to react by capturing the other in its idiosyncrasies, its abstraction, its routine...in its geometrical juxtaposition to the street, to the urban structures and to the neighbouring walker. For a brief moment, the unfathomable complexity of reality is molded into a frame and frozen in time.

In the words of Augusto Vieira da Silva (1935),“... there are in Lisbon many Lisbons. They do not know each other; barely know of each one’s existence; and when they meet, by chance, they treat each other as foreigners.”...“Real trips can be undertaken, from Lisbon to Lisbon. One goes from one neighbourhood to another to study new customs, new faces, buildings of different styles, controversial points of homeland, modern and ancient history”2.

Nearly eighty-three years have passed since these words were published and a lot has changed in the city, particularly over the last ten years as it gradually became one of the main European centres for business and tourism. But along the lines that have shaped the socio-cultural and urban architecture of the Portuguese capital over the last decades, the “new Lisbon” is still intrinsically heterogeneous, a feature only masked by the gentrification of commerce and by the masses of tourists that ow through the streets, connecting the dots between the old and the new.

I was born in Lisbon but I’m not from Lisbon. Most of my life was spent in the outskirts of the capital, in the countryside, strategically looking for the city as a satellite sent into space on a specific mission. Even though I lived there for seven years, taking the urban rumble, the chaos and the crowds as part of my journey, I’ve always felt like a visitor and was never able to establish roots in its cobblestone walkways.

Absent of any narrative construction, this body of work was born out of my experience of being resident in a city that one discovers and rediscovers at each step. To walk on journey having the same beginning and ending point; Lisbon as a single geographical entity, diverse in the specificity of its arteries, unique for the lives of those that ow through it without touching. To photograph, allowing the cosmopolitan life to take place, using the street as the stage for the stories that unfold. Stories that I’ve seen but never got to know.