Process
This project began in August 2024 during my trip to the island of São Miguel in the Açores Archipelago. Every two years, my family takes a trip to the Açores. Our connection to the island comes from my Avô and Avó, who were both born on the island. Because I've gone to the island so many times, I feel like I've taken a lot of the standard photos one might take when visiting the island. However, during this trip, I made it my goal to avoid taking those same boring pictures. So for the trip, I had two rules: avoid making tourist photos, and a photo must be posted every day from that day to my Instagram.
At the end of the trip, I had successfully completed the challenge and walked away with photos that captured the trip itself instead of the island. The constant posting created a story and timeline for the trip, and each photo gave viewers a window to see what I saw throughout the day.
Eventually, after lots of time to disconnect myself from the photos and view them with fresh eyes, I came back to them for this magazine. The idea behind the magazine was to give a timeless version of the same story told on Instagram that could live in someone's space. So with fresh eyes, I began combing through my hundreds of raw files from the trip. After creating a short list of the events and themes I wanted to focus on in the magazine, I divided the images into a few categories being Cats and hiking, The Feast, and Monte Escuro. These categories divided up the trip pretty well while still keeping the timeline and story intact.
After sorting the images, I did some editing to all of them and set them to black and white to enhance contrast and mimic how they looked when I took them. (My camera is set to display images in black and white as I take them because I find it helps me focus on composition and contrast.) During this editing stage, I took a look through two of my favorite photobooks, which are A PLACE TO DISSAPEAR by Pablo Lerma and This Place Called Home by Matt Wilson. These books have such a quiet and peaceful feeling to them in their photos and layouts, which is something I wanted to inject a bit of into my magazine.
Finally, I brought all the images together into InDesign and worked them into my layout. The process of creating the magazine was really about playing with what images fit together nicely and what told a good story. The most interesting part of the magazine for me was presenting it to different people who had different relationships to the images. The emotional connection to the photos that my family has enhances the magazine for them. Some pages left other viewers feeling a sense of wonder, while my family just laughed because they know the whole story. My cousin and fellow photographer, Michael Pacheco, had the most interesting experience in my opinion. As he went through the magazine, he was able to locate where almost every photo was taken. This is probably because he has been taking photos in the Açores for much longer than me.
