I was born in 1975, in the afterglow of the enthusiasm of the previous year’s revolution. I was not breastfed because I was a late child and my mother’s milk was not enough.
Maybe that’s why I wanted from so early an age to do so many different things in my life. I played handball at Passos Manuel and dreamed of being transferred to Benfica, I was certain that I wanted to study sports at ISEF, but ended up enrolling in computer engineering. It only lasted for a short time. I thought that if I could learn piano I would be more appealing to the girls, so I became a teacher at the Music Conservatory. I was interested in urban development and went for a PhD in Human Geography. Photography came to me very early. All throughout my childhood, my mother took beautiful photographs of me and taught me to think of light in its relation to aperture and shutter speed in her old Nikkormat 35mm, which she entrusted to me with the love that a mother has for a son. Later, with a passion for image and film, I started making short films with a pocket camera. It was a hobby, but I liked it so much that it became a profession.
In Angola, where I was two months in 2011, filming a documentary, women go about with their children strapped to their backs while selling all kinds of stuff along dusty streets and bustling boulevards. Angolan children cry little, despite the hunger. Mothers give them breast – in the street, in ‘candongueiros’ in the square, anywhere – with the natural instinct of someone who feeds a child in order for him to survive another day.
In a train journey from Benguela to Cubal, I made my first portrayal of a mother nursing her child. The embarrassment I felt was ridiculous and inadequate, and exclusive to me, as no one else in the carriage seemed to be in the least taken aback by it. I realized then that what I was shooting was much more than the mere feeding of a child.
(translated by Sara Fevereiro)
