Digital Photography – sarafsarmento

UNTITLED

INSOMNIA

PORTRAITS

EVENTS

Untitled. 2019

This is some of the most fun I’ve had photographing.
I had a few ideas and took an entire chest with props and clothes to try on my model, Débora. I’ve always enjoyed working with her because she has a background of ballet and her movements are graceful and flowy, meaning the movement in her pictures won’t be static, and I can just ask her to move a certain way and catch the movement at a given point in time, making it completely natural and spontaneous.
We went to the woods and tried out a few poses, almost all caught during some movement or other, with little forced posing.
Photography was taken by me, the model is Débora, and the makeup was by me, with a few concepts I had in mind beforehand, but also a lot of experimenting at the time. Dark colours, glitter, to make her look dark and dreamy all at the same time. Both sweet and angelic like a ballerina, but with a dark side about her as well.
I wanted to give the photographs this dreamy surreal quality, so I made it not too sharp a focus and used cellophane (my favourite) paper filters in front of the lens to achieve both some of the blur but also the bokeh effects when the light hit the paper on the lens.

Insomnia. 2013

You can’t sleep and you don’t wat to be stuck in bed. So you get up, everything is blurry, and you decide to wander around the park you’re camping at and lurk into people’s lives. You get a few scares, so you run, walk faster, eventually get lost.

This is the introduction I wrote at the time I took these pictures, meant to describe all the feelings and sensations insomnia conjures.

The blurriness is intentional to depict confusion and getting out of bed as an attempt pf going for a walk and maybe getting tired, watching life unfold with the sensation that it’s all out of place: a woman watering her plants with a hose at 2 AM in the morning, flowers looking dark and menacing in the shadows of the night.

After Hours

This is a series i’ve wanted to make for many years, and have made it through the mobile format on instagram for a period of time, which was a platform i used in the beginning a bit as a tool to share pictures i took in occasions with my friends, mostly for our own enjoyment, but beyond that personal friend-oriented approach when i wasn’t yet aware of the way strangers and other people have an interest in accessing my information, which i mostly thought went ignored, save by the people in those pictures, i used those platforms mostly as a method of experimenting with concepts and as a tool for experimentation, and only later, as a way to also share the places i went to, things i found interesting, and so on.

however, the act of putting this concept through the lens of a camera came only during my night walks near the house i had moved to during the covid-19 pandemic.

night walks and the stillness of life at night have always been something i was fascinated by, when i used to not be able to sleep at night and went exploring, usually when i was away from home, but sometimes while at home. i went on night walks, sometimes in the late hours, at times with my bike, in the area i grew up in, when i stayed at camping sites, when we stayed in vacation homes, in the area i lived in during my exchange, in the area i lived in during the pandemic, in the areas i visited. a city in the suburbs of lisbon, costa da caparica, lisbon, meco, a small village near coimbra, torre de moncorvo next to a cottage sorrounded by nothing else. i’ve walked in all these places, on my own at night, often late, sometimes early, when i needed movement or couldn’t sleep, when i needed fresh air.

in all these areas, whether the city, the country, camp sites, you develop a sense of observation of what is around: the sounds, the movement, the smells, the way the light falls, the paths, the houses, the people, the shops. what happens at night when no one else is there to see it is the theme of this series. you can check out the mobile version of this series i made over the years, here.

Portraits