My Biography
My first serious camera was a bellows camera from my father which I used to photograph the TAP Rally in the area of Sintra. Before I had tried to photograph bees on flowers with a cheap plastic camera. Macro…Never could and it took me a while to realize why.
The first laboratory of black and white, I had it in the family bathroom, on afternoons I could convince the family to dispense with the commodity.
The circuit of amateur photography was done with the passage by APAF (Portuguese Association of Photographic Art), the exhibits on the street - on laundry lines - in the gardens of the Tower of Belem and the long conversations about the advantages of D-76 over the other mixtures that everyone was discovering.
The idea, inspired by the French magazine Photo-Reporter, of leaving for South America and doing photo reportage - was the time of agencies like Gamma, Sipa, Sigma - grew ... but never became real. I did not go further than Denmark, where I stayed three years.
In the late seventies Ar.Co in Lisbon, had courses in photography, and I spent two semesters practicing black and white. The initial idea - to go to South America - never caught, but the assault of the FP-25 forces at banks in Cacem, May 5, 1980, determined somehow the future: I covered the assault as a stringer to some daily newspapers and was thrilled with the pace of photojournalism. From 1980 until 1982 I lived in Great Britain, looking for options as a freelancer, while taking a course in photography and photojournalism. The agency FPG, later bought by Getty, accepted my first slides and I fell in love with color transparency. Until digital crossed my path, in 1999.
Writting and photographing professionally has been my life for the last 30 years, from hectic moments like the assault to the Turkish embassy in Lisbon, in 1983, to the quietness of nature photography in Portugal. Editor of photography columns in various newspapers and of a printed magazine that today only exists on the web, at http://www.fotodigital-online.com, I take it slowly now. Keeping an eye on tradition within Portugal as part of our collective memory, is also something I try to maintain on my work and P.O.V.
My Recent Activity
- I added: Drums, Tradition and mobile phones
to Photo Stories on August 24, 2010 - I added: Jose Antunes Portfolio
to Galleries on August 16, 2010 - I added: The French are coming!
to Photo Stories on August 16, 2010
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