Hello there,

My name is Jan. I was born in northern Europe and moved to beautiful Lisbon, Portugal, five years ago. What initially seemed like an impulsive decision felt like the right decision upon arrival. It felt like coming home. A very strange feeling in a country where I had once been on holiday 25 years ago. But strange feelings turned out to be the guiding principle for the next five years. I decided to follow my gut feeling, and five years later, this turned out to be the only right decision.

I arrived in Portugal with nothing but my life experience and nothing else. A week earlier, I realised that I had so few possessions that my entire life could fit into a 90-litre rucksack. 

After five years as a professional photographer and a traumatic Covid period, the best camera I had was an old Samsung S5 smartphone with a broken screen. Throughout the Covid period, I was mentally incapable of taking a single photo. Taking photos is part of beautiful or memorable moments, and there simply weren't any. 

I have started my Portuguese journey in January 2021. Portugal was in a very strict lockdown at the time. Walking was only possible in your own neighbourhood. Luckily, I was assigned a room in Alfama.

The beautiful historic neighbourhood in the centre of Lisbon. It felt really surreal to be able to explore a city that seemed empty and deserted. I had seen a few videos of bustling Lisbon, but without people or activities, it is a completely different city. But at that moment, the city also reflected a large part of my personality. Beautiful, sunny, full of joie de vivre but restricted by the many rules and prohibitions. 

After doing some research on the applicable COVID rules, I discovered that walking in your own neighbourhood while maintaining social distance was allowed. And one day after my arrival, during my first walk, it happened: my first encounter with the well-known yellow tram near the church. At that very moment, the urge to take a photo struck me again! For the first time in months. Without hesitation, I grabbed that broken phone because at that moment it was the best camera I had with me. I found a good, safe position and clicked the shutter button. And bam, bang, boom, there it was, that feeling, those goosebumps I still get every time I take a good photo. That photo reignited the fire. A fire I thought would never burn again. Five years later, I still have a fire that burns brighter than ever before.

All the setbacks forced me to grow slowly. I didn't have the financial means to buy a new camera right away, and the low minimum income in Portugal certainly didn't help. But it gave me a golden opportunity. It gave me the chance to perform a slow reset. It gave me the chance to recover, find stability, and discover and develop new passions.

Two years later, I was finally able to upgrade my camera. And as the universe works, all good things come together at the right time. In the first week after purchasing that beautiful camera, I discovered my first piece of street art, which I immediately fell in love with. I was truly enchanted by it. I decided to take a photo of it, but the photo had no added value. The original was so much better than the photo. I found better photos of the work online, but nothing that matched the original. I saw a challenge, I saw an opportunity to do a photo shoot with a beautiful model in a beautiful location. Unfortunately, the weather that week put a stop to it. A weekend later, I was finally able to go back to the location to take that beautiful photo. I was very sad and disappointed to find that the artwork had disappeared from the wall when I arrived. The artwork had departed for the eternal hunting grounds. All that remained was a beautiful memory of a wonderful afternoon and one photograph. This, too, is the universe.

A typical feature of street art is that it is transient. In many cases, a new work of art replaces it, the wall disappears or the space is repurposed. That's just how the street works. That's just how real life works. And like many aspects of life, documenting it is very important. There can be various reasons for this. David Attenborough documented the entire Earth, Martha Cooper documented an entire culture, and I wanted to capture the extraordinary beauty of street art, and more specifically wall art, in books. I wanted to capture the extraordinary beauty of this art form in a medium that would really offer added value. I decided not to share my work online and to save it until I had found a medium that would do justice to the work of these artists. 

After three years of hard work, I am proud to present my first photo book. In this photo book, I have made a selection of leading works of art, divided by district in Lisbon. 

It is a photo book without text, a book without text is a book without judgement. Art is not there to judge but to inspire, to evoke emotion and to activate. With this book, I hope to encourage people to go on a journey of discovery to explore the beautiful works of art our city has to offer, or to inspire future artists to transform our city into a beautiful place. 

But in particular, I hope the book will honour a group of artists. In recent years, their works of art have allowed me to get to know a whole group of wonderful people. People who think outside the box. People who inspire and make others happy. People who solve problems. People who are capable of energising an entire neighbourhood. Through their work, I have seen entire neighbourhoods transform into beautiful, inspiring places where children now enjoy playing outside. Where children dream of a beautiful world again. 

Thank you all for making our world so beautiful,

Jan