Rafael Marchante

Over the last two years, I have spent a lot of time covering the crisis in Portugal. It is difficult to photograph because there is nothing special happening on the streets; it is a crisis that is happening behind closed doors. As photographers, our work must be subtle and we must always be attentive to looks, gestures or actions that allow us to guess the situation of the protagonists in our pictures.

My aunt Teresa gave me a camera when I was six years old and I remember taking portraits of my family. After that, I did not take any more pictures until I started studying photography several years later. Nevertheless, I think there is a strange connection between the family portraits that I took as a kid and the kind of portraits I do today.

I studied photography at the Granja School in Jerez de la Frontera. Very soon after, I began working at the newspaper “Cadiz Information”. It was really with this newspaper that I learnt the basics of photojournalism.

My first assignment was covering an ecologists' protest in downtown Cadiz. The protest was not much - just three people and a horrible banner. That day I found out that, in this profession, you don’t find yourself covering the invasion of Normandy every day.

I was based in Morocco between 2006 and 2010 and that left a big mark on me. The government labelled me a "political adversary" because of my work.

I respect all photographers who share their own particular view of the world through their pictures.