Portrait nominee

The origins of the relationship between Man and the bull are lost in history. Upper Paleolithic rock art found in Foz Côa and Lascaux are proof of this, and express the admiration and veneration of Man for the animal. Seen as a symbol of fertility and virility, target of religious cults, the bull has always been understood as a mystical animal, and thus was faced by man as a way to take hold of these qualities. Bullfighting results from these influences. The first written reference to a bullfighting activity in Portugal dates from 1258. However, these bullfighting practices came before the founding of the kingdom of Portugal (1143), and it is impossible to define the date of their origin. The “Forcados” are a group of eight men who enter the arena to immobilize the bull, dominating the animal only with the force of arms. Aligned, they are distributed from the first man (Forcado da cara) to the last, the one who holds the tail of the animal.All of these men are Forcados da cara and were photographed between seven and eleven minutes after facing the bull. Bulls weighed between 545 and 612 Kilograms.

Always having as a background the portrait and representation of the body through photography, my interest, and consequent research, is based on concepts of Identity, collective memory and Cultural Heritage, whether material or immaterial. How these three concepts can be interrelated, and how they are subject and susceptible to the increasingly dizzying changes and tensions that globalization and technological advances impose and continue to impose on them. In 2019 I started the materialization of portrait work bodies that can help a reflection on these themes. Born in 1977, I graduated in Photography from IADE (Faculty of Design, Technology and Communication) in 1999, and since then I have been collaborating with the Portuguese press as a free-lancer photographer, making almost exclusively portrait. Over these years I have also collaborated with Angolan, Brazilian and German publications. In 2003 I enrolled in the Anthropology course at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in an attempt to more consistently support the crossing of the two disciplines. In 2019 I studied “Aesthetics” and “History of contemporary art” at the National Society of Fine Arts, in Lisbon, where I am currently studying “Visual Culture and Image Theory”.