Surrender.
- On André Carvalho's photographic practice
(Text by Diane Soeiro, January 2026)
Why take photographs with a traditional camera? You know, film. Why take photographs at all? And frame them. A frame. Isn’t that what you give your mother? Or your grandmother? Why bother? There’s no way around it. You do it because you have to. No questions asked.
André doesn’t work in series. He mostly just walks around, taking pictures in his mind’s eye, as if under a spell of unimaginable and unnoticed things—forgotten spaces that escaped even the most rigorous spatial planning long ago, or temporary occupations. If an image stays with him long enough, he goes back determined to capture what has held him for days, sometimes months. “More recently, possessed by a new process” that he was forced to welcome, he goes around, camera, film ready—according to a colour or a black-and-white mood. He spots something, frames it almost simultaneously in his mind and camera, and clicks. One thing, however, hasn’t changed over the years: the revelation, deliberately, takes a minimum of two to three weeks to occur. After seeing the images, he sometimes returns to the place, stubbornly photographing it again, intending to get this time a proper hold of it—sometimes for hours. Patiently looking for the mysterious place or object to be caught off guard and lend itself to the camera. An eye for an eye. Surrender. The process elevates it into a specific type of photography. The persistent type.
Patterns do emerge over the years, and this becomes clear when running through his extensive catalogue of images. Most of them will never see the light of day, and among the ones that could, he often rejects them immediately because the image doesn’t capture what he actually saw. It’s there but not it. These are the images that will be forgotten in the archive, that will eventually become an old archive.
In André’s work, the most important element isn’t what is being shown. What he sees, most of the time, wouldn’t be memorable to anyone. That seems like a recurring theme: photographing something that is not memorable, yet immortalised in an image. What elevates these images, then? They seem to lend themselves to an exercise of control and restraint. An equal dose of control over what is shown and restraint on his own part. A game between the capture he wants to achieve and the restraint of not letting himself be caught by the image he has in his mind. The intensity of control we, as viewers, may feel, comes from his effort to exert equal mastery over the subject as it tries to assert over him. Restraint, because André likes to be with a plan, carefully orchestrating how he will capture it. Sometimes reality wins—“a bad picture”. Sometimes he does, as he says,—“a not-so-bad picture”.
His most recent selection of pictures spans over ten years. You’ll never know when exactly they were captured—for better or worse—because they privilege unmemorable sites and natural elements; they are largely devoid of time. If they are truly timeless, only time will tell. That said, there is one exception: once, he attempted a series of portraits. These are certainly memorable to someone, and perhaps precisely for that reason, he hasn’t returned to the theme since. Yet one of them successfully escaped reality, both embodying (and reflecting) the photographer’s intended balance between control and restraint.