Hi everybody, I have decided to, in addition to posting images, write a bit about the creative process, and the forces behind making art, in the context I live.
First I would like to talk a little about my background, and how I came to be what I am now.
In 1997, I entered the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, as an undergraduate student, pursuing a career in Biological Sciences, in the medical research field. My main goal was to understand the details of life in its most simple organizations, its auto-regulatory systems, its nuances. After two years studying Biochemistry, Biophysics, and a handful of other disciplines I decided to take a break. I bought an air ticket to New York and soon after, I was thousands of miles away from everything I knew. So far away from home, I wanted to make sure I kept records of this journey. I bought a 35 mm camera, and started a journal, which I forced myself to write. The photographs kept happening through this journey, with way more frequency than the writings, of course. I was fascinated by my new medium. No more petri dishes, no more microscopes. Life-size life, very immediate, in my face, and a camera. After six months between New York and Boston, I bought a ticket to London, and soon after, I went in my Europe journey. At this point, I knew that I had found a new direction, I started to take photography as a real possibility, a career, a "modus vivendi". I spent 7 months traveling in Europe, and planning how I would make this transition. I had to go back to school, only this time, to study in depth my new beloved discipline. I was on my way back to Rio, when I decided to stop in Boston for a few days. One day, while navigating the web I met Aline Duarte, another Brazilian, like me, also looking for answers, very far away from home. She was in Saint Louis, studying Computer Sciences, had just transfered from Brazil a year earlier. Two weeks after we met on the web, she drove all the way from Saint Louis to Boston, and we finally met. After hours spent getting to know each other, we found that we had a lot in common, she too, was leaving behind 4 years of study, in a field she did not find too much passion. Two more weeks after we met in Boston, we decided to live together. I gathered up all my academic material, had it translated, got a student visa, and enrolled in a College in Saint Louis. We lived in a small apartment, which became clustered with books, drawings, sketches, photographs, and computer parts. My first semester there was unlike anything I had experienced in College. I studied Sculpture, Design, Photography, and Aline kept working the intricacies of computer engineering, until she finally decided to switch majors again, and this time she had decided to pursue her artistic instincts. We were both immersed in philosophical and aesthetic studies and experimented with photography in addition to many other media, such as digital video, sculpture and written word. In 2002 we transferred to the Photography and Cinema Department at the Southern Illinois University in Carbondale where we followed our studies into the aesthetics of the moving image. We have had quite a few shows in Saint Louis, and won an award from the "Saint Louis Artists` Guild" for a diptych made in collaboration with Mark Lockwood, in the show "Savvy"-Influence of Media in Contemporary Society. We keep a studio in Saint Louis, where we continue to produce work.

On July 08 2004 Edit