Up and Coming : Hugo Feio Machado
'Requiem to a Dying Planet' is an ongoing project which is taking me to places in the World where sustainable forms of development still exist. I photograph them. My second approach, as begun in January 2010, is towards a new landscape, climate and geography. I want to achieve the minimum target of one work per location every year.
My love towards photography started at home, in Lisbon, with a manual of photography and my father’s hand-held camera. It was Newport, Gwent and my studies in Documentary Photography that gave me a greater insight about how I see and understand photography today.
I make photographs with my love and understanding for people, space, structure and narrative. I bring those elements into my photography, plus a consciousness of the power of images and strategies on producing visual documents.
Martha Rosler in her essay 'In ,around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)' states that the common acceptance of the idea that documentary precedes, supplants, transcends, or cures substantive social activism is an indicator that we do not have a real documentary.
I want to record and create a narrative that can be the spark or the catalyst that leads to forms of positive action either for the individual or for the collective.
Images taken from the series 'Requiem to a Dying Planet' © Hugo Feio Machado
Hugo Feio Machado recently graduated from the University of Wales, Newport, Gwent with a BA Hons in Documentary Photography. The first stage of his ongoing body of work 'Requiem to a Dying Planet' was produced in Merzouga, a small Berber settlement in the region of Er-rachidia on the Moroccan border with Algeria. His work was recently exhibited at the Candid Arts Gallery in London. He is currently based in England where he works as a Photographer.
Posted by Pablo Allison
