Photo by Harold de Smet
A horn player
with a restless eye.
I grew up in Lisbon and spent most of my twenties moving — The Hague, Weimar, Amsterdam — chasing a career as a French horn player. I'm in Freiburg now with my partner. It's quieter here, greener. The Atlantic feels far away.
Photography crept in without much intention. My mother had a camera I liked to borrow. Then it was whatever phone was in my pocket, always trying to squeeze a decent frame out of whatever was in front of me. Japan was what finally pushed me to buy a real camera. I came back from that trip with one, and a habit I still haven't fixed: regretting every time I leave the house without it.
I shoot on instinct. What pulls my eye is geometry where it doesn't belong, colour combinations that have no right to work, the specific disorder a street or a landscape sometimes holds for exactly one second. Being somewhere new helps — but I'll still stop on a Freiburg afternoon when the light does something worth stopping for.
Music and photography are separate things for me. The horn is where I put what's going on inside. The camera is where I try to hold what I see. They don't really talk to each other.
I was trained as a musician and ended up a photographer too, among other things. I don't think that's unusual. Most people are capable of far more than what they're asked to do — the expected version of you tends to be the smallest one.