Birds, 2014

Gonçalo Martins  

Gonçalo Martins is a Portuguese photographer, who lives and works in Portimao.

Since he was young, attracted by nature and extreme sports, it was skateboarding that connected him to photography. In 2006, he started to capture images of the manoeuvres, with his Sony print-and-shoot 1.3mp, to my most adventurous friends.

Later, he bought his first digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera and started a learning process that he was never able to abandon. Early on, he realized that the digital world was not able to show his feelings through photography or give him the basic knowledge of how an image turns into paper. Thus, he moved to the analogue world that introduced him to several renowned photographers, such as Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Clyde Butcher, Ruth Bernhard, among others.

Nowadays, he considers himself an amateur photographer with a special taste for black and white. He focuses on portrait photography, but mainly on landscape where nature shows a wide range of scenarios in harmony with different types of light. The creation of a photograph on paper, from capturing an image to developing the roll and enlarging it, is a process that requires enormous effort, but the final art is one that tells us a story through a simple image.