Hi this is Vanessa Joy here and I am with Leo of Nitro. We are in Brazil and he is a
photographer here. He does documentary photography in Brazil mostly, but you do
travel sometimes, correct? So thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you. Thank you for visiting our country and doing these interviews.
Yes, yes we're having fun with it.
So why don't I get a little bit about your business and your background.
Did you always just want to focus on documentary photography?
No, I started as an assistant working with a fashion photographer and it was like eight months,
eight months with him. He suggested to me to work with photojournalists so I was
going to get in touch with several areas of photography. When we started Nitro
like 12 years ago we are we're still doing everything like studio, weddings
and still photos of products and a little photojournalism too. Then we started
to focus on one thing and what we liked the most, story telling.
Story telling, yes, and then you can really focus on that and enhance that and make that a master of that craft
rather than doing everything. So, you work a whole lot you work 24 hours a day, but what do you
like to do for fun? There's the photography I do for a living. I have my clients, they pay
me. I go there and I just love it. I love what I do and there's the photography I
do for me. My personal projects. I put a lot of energy on these projects.
So do you find these personal projects give you creativity? Do they give you relaxation?
How does it add to your life?
They're the things I do because I want to do them and I work with
documentaries so I just find these subjects that I think they're very important and
stories that need to be told and I go after them. It's good for business too
because for example, in my area, if I'm
in a meeting with a client and I have my personal book to show it, most of the
clients they like it, because, like this how do I say, it's like a portfolio.
But what it's doing is it's letting you sell yourself rather than your photography.
photography because there's a billion photographers out there that you could go
to and get a similar result, at least from his eyes, but when you start telling your own
story, that's a huge selling point and he's not going to be able to get you anywhere else.
Yeah and I think I remain going in Nitro. It's to make our personal projects,
to make money too. Some of them we achieve that but I think we put out
this energy in this project because they're beginning to, you know, to define us.
That's what most of the people that know Nitro now, it's because of our projects,
more than our corporate or editorial photography and I think this is good for us.
I have this personal project, so when I'm, for example, on a vacation or with my family I
don't have the need to photograph everything, you know, because this is time I
want to rest. It is a problem.
It is a problem. Raise your hand if you've been asked to
photograph an event you thought you were invited to. You know it's funny, when I
asked you what you did for fun and you came back at me with photography at
first, in my mind I was thinking 'oh my gosh he never knows how to put down the
camera' and you know, you kind of live with it as an extension from your arm, but what you're
telling me now is you still use photography to make money. It's still
your passion but you still know how to live your life too.
Yeah, I'm just finishing this project. It's a
prison, just for pregnant women and women with children with like less than a year.
I spent like a year going there like once a week or sometimes twice a week
and this is a personal project. I've just finished the design of the book. There's a
friend of mine that made the design and we are now, we are going for
publishing houses to see if we can get it published.
The photos are not on the internet yet because there's the sensitive thing
about the children. There's a law in Brazil that you can't publish photos of
children if they are, if they live in a risk situation. So these children, they
live inside a prison. We are expecting the book to be ready and then we're
going to show the story to the world.
Thank you so much for sharing your creativity, your passion and
and all that you do. OK thank you. I will see you guys next time here on AdoramaTV.