Portrait of Photographer Gonçalo Duarte Pacheco

Gonçalo Duarte Pacheco

Photographer Gonçalo Duarte Pacheco Biography

Gonçalo Duarte Pacheco graduated in Architecture in 2013, having collaborated in several Studios (in Lisbon) until 2016, where he formed his own studio – Gonçalo Duarte Pacheco Architects and a photography studio – Outro Estúdio, which in addition to responding to private orders, investigates Architecture and Landscape photography in the most diverse hypotheses.
As a photographer, in addition to commissioned architecture photography, Gonçalo Duarte Pacheco focuses on landscapes intervened by man, namely in two aspects – scale and relationship with the environment. At the scale level, it is important to understand human intervention in the various dimensions – built / not built, light / heavy, integrated / out of scale. At the level of the relation with the environment, the study verifies hypotheses of relation with populations and places that relates with colossal structures (Factories, PowerPlant, Quarries), totally out of scale, and apart from the natural environment.

He considers Time as an essential factor because it’s “an agent where the sequential transformations of the landscape are reflected. As a medium, photography captures a specific moment in this relationship and thus requires to return to the sites more than once.

Gonçalo Duarte Pacheco published a first book “Weightless – Tracing Landmarks” (you can directly buy on the website of the artist) and at this occasion, CreativInn had the opportunity to interview him.

The book relates photography, landscape and architecture through experience as a moment of capturing and revealing places, functioning as an atlas of new landmarks, in a travel cycle that lasted approximately four years, between 2016 and 2020, in a territory circumscribed around the Arctic Circle.

Photographer Gonçalo Duarte Pacheco Artist Statement

Weightless is the opposite of this structures and refers to to the adaptation of man to the environment, in a symbiotic and almost precise relationship, in the way it adapts, in terms of scale, materials, the shape of constructions. The natural environment does not change. The water courses run in the same places.
In the dimension of the built, I have been interested at the same time, in landscapes that symbolize a certain dimension of emptiness, where for various reasons, man did not intervene, nor did he change the landscape. These landscapes will be the motto of a second book, called “Tundra”.