Gérard Castello-Lopes Biography

Gérard Castello-Lopes was born in Vichy on August 6th, 1925, to a Portuguese father and a French mother. He lived in Lisbon, Cascais and Strasbourg, before settling in Paris latere on. In the 1950s, he took over “Filmes Castello-Lopes”, the film distribution company founded in Lisbon in 1916 by his father. A true jack-of-all-trades, he worked as an assistant director, actor, author and film critic.> Read more

He turned to photography in 1956, after discovering Henri Cartier-Bresson's Images à la sauvette in a Parisian bookshop. For 10 years, in addition to his work as a film distributor, Gérard Castello-Lopes took to the streets - in Lisbon, Brussels, Rome and Prague - and photographed what he saw.

Suddenly, in 1966, he gave up photography for almost fifteen years. During this period, his work fell into oblivion.

In 1974, after forty years of dictatorship, the Carnation Revolution brought down the Estado Novo of António de Oliveira Salazar. And it was not until 1982 that Gérard Castello-Lopes was exhibited for the first time at the Ether Gallery in Lisbon

By then, the Portugal Castello-Lopes captured was already a thing of the past: it was now a democracy, pursuing its economic development and even about to join the European Union. His photos now had a historic resonance: as the dark years of dictatorship fade away, Gérard Castello-Lopes becomes one of the few people to have photographed the Portugal during this era.

In the wake of the success of his exhibition, he returned to photography, partially abandoning human subjects in favor of a more plastic and refined style. He died on February 12, 2011, at the age of 85.

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