“Noites do Norte” (Nights of the North) is a nocturnal and poetic immersion in northern Portugal.
The prolonged Covid-19 pandemic brought us the difficult experience of confinement and social isolation. Amidst pain, uncertainty, fear, and so many lives lost, this contemporary plague made us reflect on our small privileges and daily needs.

It was against this backdrop that I arrived to live in Portugal in October 2020. It wasn’t long before, in January 2021, we began to experience an extensive and exhausting lockdown lasting more than three months. At a time when the comfort of social contact became a temporary danger, I found myself needing to reframe my experience of the pandemic and my first months in the country from the quiet and solitude of winter nights, thus discovering fragments of the culture and beauty of northern Portugal.

In this respite, I sought a fantastic reading of the need to reinvent the way we look at what is before us. Along the way, night photography, which is not part of my daily routine but comes naturally to me, gave me the freedom to reproduce what I imagined.

The images for the project were captured over a period of fourteen months (from January 2021 to March 2022), but my intention was to project the narrative of a fantastic night, capturing the landscape at different times between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m.

The photographs in “Noites do Norte” were taken in 26 municipalities in northern Portugal, and all aesthetic effects, such as movements and use of colors, were created at the moment the image was captured.