In “Faces of Macau”, Portuguese photojournalist Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro wants to highlight the importance of wearing a mask these days. He is currently publishing the photos daily on his Instagram page (@facesofmacau). Later, he may develop the project into an exhibition or even publish a book. “The guiding thread is the masks. I want to have this subliminal message that one of the ways to fight this pandemic is to use a mask. As long as there is no treatment or vaccine, the great accessory in our daily lives is the mask,” Gonçalo explains. “At a time when there is always debate about whether to wear a mask, I thought I would like to keep a record for future memory of some portraits with some diversity,” he adds.
To begin the project that he has been working on for only a few weeks, Gonçalo started by photographing people he knew. Then he began approaching people on the street, a process that is not always easy.
“Some people are not interested in being photographed. It can be difficult to approach some local Chinese people on the street to photograph them. I have a paper translated into Chinese and I show it to them, but sometimes they get a little scared. The idea is to show these faces with a mask, the faces of the Macau pandemic. The approach on the street is of special interest, and so far it has worked,” he says.
Gonçalo reveals that he has already managed to collect close to 55 portraits, a number that is fast approaching the minimum goal he intends to achieve. “I have to get to 100. A number of people have joined, and I have received messages from people who would like to participate in the project and I accept them,” explains the photojournalist.
Regarding how long he plans to collect images, Gonçalo is not very concerned.
“I think the project has legs to walk. We are going to be living in this pandemic for the next months, it is not an issue that will end tomorrow. We will continue to wear masks for much longer, so I think I can continue. But I also have no interest in having exorbitant numbers, with 500 or 1,000 portraits, it doesn’t make sense,” he says.
Throughout the project, Gonçalo wants to focus on diversity, bringing together faces from Macau from the most diverse quarters. He has portrayed people of various nationalities, but there is one person in particular that he would like to photograph: Ho Iat Seng.
“The current Chief Executive would make perfect sense and I’m not ruling him out, I will try to make that contact,” he says. “But I would also like to have unknown people, someone from the market, even a casino dealer, but special authorization is needed for that so I’m trying,” he adds.
At a later stage, Gonçalo says that he would like to make an exhibition or publish a book, but everything will also depend on the collection of material.
“To have a small book I would need to have over 100 photographs. But for an exhibition, these numbers don’t work so well, so I would have to make a more careful selection of some portraits. But that is in the future, first is to focus on the project and try to understand where I can go and what forms of portraits I can make. The idea is to try to do something to mark the fact that the pandemic has also passed through here,” he concludes.
