I got my first camera when I was 12. It was one of those small Kodaks with 110 film in a cassette. I used it to capture my first images. At home, there was also an old Mamiya and a couple of lenses lying around, being the source of a lot of interest.

But it was another instrument that would capture my heart and be my great passion throughout adolescence. A guitar, classical guitar lessons, and later on an electric guitar, hard rock music, and to top it all off, a higher education at the Jazz Studio in Antwerp, would occupy my artistic vein for many years. After higher music education, a degree in history and moving to Portugal were what followed next.

In order to survive in a new country, I chose to work in IT. The next eight years, it would be my left hemisphere to dominate, but sleeping passions never cease to be passions, and by definition, they are very strong. As a consequence, after a stretch with a double life (days face glued to the computer screen and nights in the darkroom), my right hemisphere would gain the upper hand once again, and in 2003, I dedicated myself full-time to photography, as a photojournalist for a picture wire agency.

A little later, the choice shifts to performance photography (being now ironically on the other side of the stage) and developing reportage work about social issues of our times, adding writing to photography in the works. It’s this work that gets attention in exhibitions and print in Portuguese and international galleries, newspapers and magazines. Since 2008, travel and adventure journalism and photography have become a more important part of my work, but my main interest is portraying ordinary man/woman, and giving him/her the place in history they deserve, instead of being reduced to a statistic.

In 2011, I exhibited some of my work done in Angola in Luanda and Lisbon with great success. In 2012, I successfully launched the first Portuguese language travel guide to Angola, an alternative work filled with pictures and travel experiences. In the same year, I was invited as a speaker for the TEDxLuanda conference. At this moment, I’m working on an ambitious documentary project, also in Angola, where I currently reside. What motivates my reportage work is my enormous curiosity in discovering and documenting ordinary people and their lives. It’s those people who don’t belong to the jet-set, nor live in misery and who are normally only represented by statistics who drive and motivate me to keep my eyes, heart and mind wide open.