Rui Palha is a simple man. For multiple hours a day, he walks through the streets of his hometown of Lisbon, Portugal, and captures the magical and meditative moments through his camera's lens. From lonely office workers running through the rain to beaming faces of locals in troubling neighbourhoods, Palha's carefully composed black-and-white street photography captures the soul, as well as unseen angles and moods of Lisbon's vibrant urbanscape.
Starting his photographic journey at 14 years of age, Palha, who is retired after working in the IT field, is often referenced as an inspiration to young photographers; he was voted on two websites in 2015 as one of the top street photographers in the world. As an amateur photographer (he's never accepted money for any of his work), he's exhibited his photographs around the world, and he's dropped by Bangkok this month. His photos are being exhibited at House of Lucie in Ekamai from now until Oct 31.
"Wandering In Portugal" features 26 selected photographs which embodies his many styles of street photography from portraits, to documentary, to fine art.
"I like people. Street people. It's the only way I can live -- speaking with people on the streets," said Palha earlier this month. "That movement in the street -- the shining of the pavement, that always attracted me a lot."
Taking photographs almost every day, Palha seeks to discover and learn new things about his city and people -- wanting to understand how they live their lives. He's especially attracted to the lone soul -- a motif repeated often in his works.
"I like a bit of the solitude to show in a very crowded city, the loneliness that people have but never show. Every person is different and every person has their own soul and their way of seeing, way of speaking, and way of understanding life and all around," he said. "That's what I try to discover. I have a few photos that were taken in 'dangerous' places. For me they're not dangerous, but they are called 'dangerous neighbourhoods' of Lisbon. I learn a lot because they have a very different way of life. They have a very hard life and they are always stigmatised by society. I think it's very an important theme in street photography."
Palha, who is a self-taught photographer, finds love in street photography due to its non-repetitive nature. Every minute and every second, the light changes, the people change, and you can repeat the same routes for thousands of days without ever coming across the same thing.
"I think the most important part in street photography is to capture a unique moment, a different moment, a decisive moment," he said. "But it's not only to capture that. You have to capture that within a meaningful composition. You have to [look at] the background, the foreground, the subject -- everything at the same time. You must think very fast. I'm not a street shooter. A street shooter is a person that shoots everything that moves. I don't do that. I try to make meaningful compositions and beautiful framing. Sometimes during my sleep I dream of places, and I saw a composition that I never saw before. So when I wake up, I go to those places and I search for the composition that was in my dream."
Along with taking his ethereal and oneiric images, Palha's street portraits shed light onto stigmatised communities of Portugal. Going into areas that are deemed dangerous, the photographer makes friends and creates activities for the community to thrive. For a recent project "Grow With Dignity", he exhibited his portraits within the community on clothing lines, and allowed people to take their portraits home.
"It was incredible," he said. "I could see people crying, smiling, jumping. It was wonderful. I think they are the main subjects of photography. It's not the photographer. The main people are always the street models. If these people didn't exist, my photos wouldn't exist too.
"Black and white photographs, and street photography isn't very commercial," he said. "I have to tell you a quote that is not mine. It's by Ted Grant, 'When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls'.
"I agree with this. What I think is important [when people] come to see my exhibition is to discover things in places that they know but never saw.
"While I can walk and I can be in the street, I will never give up. One day, if I can't walk, because I'm getting older, I will sit down and will look at the thousands of photographs I have never [developed]."
- Exhibiting until Oct 31
- House of LucieEkkamai 8
- Opening hours:Tue-Fri, 11am-6pmSat, 12pm-5pm
