In Pelotas, in the far south of Brazil, in a friend’s garage turned into a photographic darkroom, under the red light, waiting for the paper to decide what it wanted to give me. That became the job. Being completely in the room at the second the image arrives (later I understood a photograph invents that second more than it keeps it).
I spent many years behind cameras, on film sets, inside production schedules that teach you one thing above all else: get it right when there is no second take. Films for Anitta, campaigns for Motorola, editorials for Vogue, boxers in Rio Claro, shoots in Paris and Tokyo. Later the sets turned into tables, decision tables in more cities than I can count, and a few tray tables somewhere between them. The kind of work where the brief says one thing and the room needs another, and you have to read both without anyone explaining the difference.
Over time I realized what I was actually doing had less to do with cameras than with something harder to name. Noticing. Reading surfaces. Knowing when a shot, a team, a conversation was carrying something real, and when it was performing.
I think that comes from years of getting things wrong in enough rooms that your body starts to register quality before your vocabulary catches up.
Now I live in São Paulo, and the rooms stopped fitting in one building. I’m co-founder and CEO of Matter + Energy, a creative house born in Latin America that grew past the point where I can see all of it at once, which forced me to learn the difference between making the work and making the people who make the work. I founded Magma, a film production company that still believes the sentence on its door: people change things. There is also the music I produce, the vinyl records, the essays, the drawings made of code, and a list that has no intention of stopping. I still shoot. The title changes depending on the week and I stopped trying to make it hold still. What stays is the proximity. Close enough to the material to feel when something is off.
If there is a through-line, I think it’s authorship. Signature is what’s left after you remove everything that could have been made by anyone, and half of it is the things you refused to do. Finding that in my own work, and helping the people around me find it in theirs. Big or small. Choosing, with attention.
