About

Urivaldo Lopes

I left Mindelo at fifteen. First France, then Italy — I trained as a fashion designer before I ever called myself a photographer. My years at Blumarine taught me that a garment is a line, a shadow, a decision, and I have been looking at everything that way since.

I work between fashion and the islands. Editorial stories for Slimi, Schön!, French Revue de Modes, Wonderland, Marie Claire. Campaigns for Maje, Rodier, Sinéquanone. And when the work lets me, I go home. Cape Verde is not a backdrop in my pictures — it's the thing that taught me how to see. The black sand, the pastel walls, the way light falls at four in the afternoon in Santo Antão, the stance of a woman who has always known how to stand.

What I am after is not beauty. Beauty is easy. I am after the tension underneath it — symmetry with a little gloom, glamour with a little salt, the frame that looks composed until you notice it isn't. I direct. I compose. Sometimes the camera is in my hands, sometimes it isn't. The authorship is the same.

These prints are the work I choose to live with. If one of them speaks to you, I'm glad. That's the whole point of making them