With scenes of a gloomy city, sometimes emptied, sometimes with spaces in dispute, self-taught photographer Daniel Monteiro, 26, proposes to take another look at the chaotic routine that moves streets, bars, squares and parks at night in Belo Horizonte. “I don’t really know how to classify my work, because it wasn’t anything I thought much about. On the contrary, it was always something more spontaneous, a language that I developed through identification”, recognizes the author of photographs that went viral on social media, with records of the urban landscape of the capital of Minas Gerais.
“I confess that I was a little surprised and a little unsure why it went so viral,” he says, who celebrated, last week, the fact that he had surpassed the 10,000 followers mark on Instagram.
“What I think happened now was an expansion of this with TikTok and Instagram, which allowed me to reach more people, including older people and people from other cities, people who said they had never looked at the city in this way. On X (formerly Twitter), on the other hand, since I started photographing BH, there was always a post that went viral”, he indicates, stating that he likes to record images mainly of the center of Belo Horizonte.
“It’s my favorite place, because besides the fact that the city was planned in that region, I feel that there is an interesting flow of people and traffic in the photographic record”, details Monteiro, who works professionally as a photographer carrying out shoots with artists, who usually to print album covers or to be used to promote new projects.
Photographer Daniel Monteiro, who went viral with photos of a ‘dystopian’ BH
The city records themselves, on the other hand, remain, for him, more of a pastime than anything else. In these images, captured on a Sony A7 with an analogue lens and on an iPhone SE, Monteiro favors the night and rainy days, which lend a nocturnal atmosphere to the scenes he recorded.
Obviously, by neglecting natural light, their records give prominence to the artificial lighting of lamps, headlights, signs and neons that color the city, whose landscape is valued not only from the perspective of the author of the click, but also from the editing work – done in Lightroom, whether on your computer or smartphone – which focuses on the high contrast of images and the prevalence of colors that are sometimes cold, sometimes warm.
@danielmonteirox BH on a rainy day looks beautiful ✨ fotografo fotografia tiktokfoto fyp belohorizonte street ♬ Stargazing (Slowed + Reverb) – Marcelo De Carvalho
This set of elements forms an image identity that began to be assimilated by the artist when he was still a teenager, through cinema.
References
“When I was 12, I watched a film called ‘Tron: Legacy’ and I thought the images were very beautiful, impactful. I think it was the first time I had contact with this futuristic, dystopian identity”, comments Daniel Monteiro, mentioning the American science fiction film released in 2010, directed by Joseph Kosinski.
The reference remained in reserve until 2016, when Monteiro graduated from high school and began to explore the functions of a camera. “I started going out to take landscape photos to learn, to discover how to use the equipment; studying focus, light…”, he states, remembering that, at that time, this aesthetic focus was dormant and would only be explored when, two years later, he already felt more confident when making his clicks.
“I think this focus reappeared when I watched the film ‘Blade Runner’, both the oldest and the most recent”, he says. “As I was already photographing, I tried to bring that aesthetic, which enchanted me, to my eyes”, he reveals, amid praise for both the 1982 version, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, and the 2017 version, which had Denis Villeneuve as director and Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford in the cast.
To these productions are added, above all, almost all of the films already made by filmmaker Wong Kar-Waibelonging to the movement called the “Second New Wave” of Hong Kong cinema, being the first Chinese to win the award for best director at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1997. “Whenever I post a photo, someone appears saying it reminds me of the setting of one of his films”, he comments, sensitively proud of the repeated comparison.
“Furthermore, over time, I started looking for other sources of inspiration, something I found by following some photographers, mainly Asian, who I follow on social media”, he points out, adding that, today, his biggest reference is photographer Rafaela Urbanin – “she is also from BH and also uses a language similar to what I am looking for”.
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