Gérard Castello-Lopes

Born in Vichy, in 1925. Gérard Castello-Lopes lived in Lisbon, Cascais, Strasbourg, where he was part of the Diplomatic Corps of the Permanent Mission of Portugal to the Council of Europe. He later took up residence in Paris. Degree in Economics from the I.S.C.E.F. from Lisbon. Film professional, photographer and critic. Manager of a society in the audiovisual field. He dedicated to photography from 1956 onwards. Assistant director of the Portuguese film "Os Pássaros de Asas Cortadas" (1962) and staging of two operas performed by the Experimental Chamber Opera Group, sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Founding member of the Portuguese Film Center. Co-author and production and directing assistant, together with Fernando Lopes and Nuno de Bragança, of the short film "Nacionalidade: Português" (1970). President of the Jury of Instituto Português de Cinema from 1991 to 1993. Member of the Advisory Board of Culturgest. His "training" as a photographer was that of an autodidact. Like almost all other photographers of that time, his apprenticeship was not academic (there were no photography courses) and was based, on one hand, on a natural impulse to represent reality, on the other, on an intense interest in other plastic or representational arts, such as painting, sculpture, cinema and photography itself. The method consisted of learning the technical fundaments of photography - which is easily learned in books -, defining an orientation on the preferred "object" of his photographic activity (taking Henri Cartier-Bresson as a paradigm), and continually comparing the result of what he was producing with the photographic "corpus" that was provided to him by foreign magazines and books of the specialty, in the absence or ignorance of a Portuguese equivalent "corpus". In essence, his method was pragmatic or, said in English, trial and error. Critics and essays He was a film critic for the magazine "O Tempo e o Modo" (1964/1966). Collaborator in several Portuguese press bodies, such as "A Tarde" and "Semanário" (1982/1984) Distinctions 2006 Founding member of the Júlio Pomar Foundation 2006/2007   Annualia Verbo Photography Prize. Delivery of the Prize at the CCB Dies in Paris in February 2011.