Bio

Rodrigo West is a documental photographer and a portrait photographer. He was born in Rio de Janeiro, in a family of artists. When he was still a child he moved to Salvador (Bahia), where he got in touch with the African-Brazilian culture and with a new context of social, economic and cultural multiplicity that would be crucial to form the human awareness that characterizes his personal history and his photographic production.

Since 2009 he has been visiting different regions of Brazil with his camera in order to understand, observe and capture Brazilians’ behavior and how they interact with their environment – influencing and being influenced by it. In search for a continuous expansion of his horizons, in the following years he traveled all over Brazil – besides visiting more than 30 countries worldwide – developing and expanding his photographic production.

Presently, he is simultaneously dedicated to the production of three authorial projects: Simplesmente Maria (“Just Mary”), where he depicts the life of an inhabitant of the sertão (rough northeast region) of Bahia; Eu me governo (“I rule myself”), whose main character is Cadu, a lady from the region called Recôncavo Baiano who – close to her 100th birthday – keeps making craftwork to guarantee support to her family, and Cubahia, in which he searches to highlight and portrait the points of convergence between the cultures from Bahia and Cuba.

Rodrigo graduated in Marketing at FGV (Fundação Getulio Vargas) and is now attending a post-graduation course in Philosophy and Self-Knowledge at PUC-RS (Pontifícia Universidade Católica - Rio Grande do Sul). He also cooperates with the Community Photographers Without Borders, whose compromise is to connect storytellers to NGOs worldwide, having as a base the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. From the improvement of his ability in translating the complexity of the most varied stories, realities and feelings in images, came the humanitarian bias of a photographic work which is coherent and mature and has a lot to say to the world.

Bruna Ramos da Fonte

Biographer, Writer and Psychoanalyst