Familiar Outsider

"Familiar Outsider" explores the possibility of depicting the masculine universe inside Porto, Portugal, a yet very sexist and traditional city. Amidst its streets and bars and squares, you can see words, objects and characters: layers of this raw beauty, hidden and disguised as reality's banality.

The public space, especially in residential neighborhoods, is occupied primarily by men. Women, almost always, are in transit. The men portraited are frequently in the outskirts of a bar. Some of them work, others drink the whole day, others live in the margin of society, surviving through sketchy activities or no job at all. Outsiders, just like me, a Brazilian immigrant, a photographer looking for its purpose.

This project was born out of the desire to unite conviviality with the curiosity to know the space in which I am now, allowing me to dwell on the poetic gestures of a day-to-day sustained by decadence, but stimulated by the incongruity and the easy reception of apparent contradictions.

My approach, from a sensitive and feminine point of view, intends to provoke tensions and to put in question this segregated space through minimalistic and, sometimes, claustrophobic images while also respecting their integrity and becoming familiar to them.

The contradiction found in this peculiar world and the ritual of habit became inviting to experimentation, imperfection and the eventual discovery of colors and textures only existing on the film surface, revealed in the absence of constant eyes.

In this selection, there is a mix of more direct portraits and images of surrounding elements that hint aspects of frailty and ambiguity. Creating these images became a way to underline my experience, justifying me to penetrate spaces at first "forbidden" or of difficult access and to become closer, revealing male recesses, sharing intimacies and yet other aspects still to come.