New Lisbon



Exploding housing market prices and low salaries have left at least 10.000 families without their homes in Lisbon, Portugal. Unregulated foreign real-estate investment and the Airbnb industry, that has increased 30 times its size in the last few years, have created a housing crisis that is fueled by the city’s popularity, making it the city in Europe and the sixth in the world where it is hardest for its inhabitants to pay for rent.

"New Lisbon" follows the intimate lives of vulnerable individuals that are deeply affected by the housing crisis in the Portuguese capital. As the social fabric unravels, and Lisbon falls prey to gentrification and foreign real estate investment, rent burdened families have to take extreme measures to keep a roof over their head, squatting abandoned apartments and sleeping rough.

Even as the Portuguese economy reached its first surplus in decades, the housing situation was already dramatic. Now, with a looming social and economic crisis powered by the COVID-19 pandemic, things are expected to get much worse.

The "New Lisbon" project, started in late 2018 after arriving from a 5 month reporting trip to India. It refers to a new city, that was unknown to me due to the deep scars that gentrification left in Lisbon, but also because of the people and the stories who are pictured, and were previously locked behind closed doors. During the past three years, I've been documenting these lives with the hope that their individual stories would shed light on a topic that is of crucial importance in Portugal and beyond.


Latest:

- New Lisbon - exhibited at the Santa Maria Maior Gallery in Lisbon, Portugal 2023

- New Lisbon won the Leica Oskar Barnack Award - Newcomer 2020

- New Lisbon” was a finalist in “Community Understanding Award” at the 78th Pictures of the Year International

- New Lisbon won the Yunghi Grant 2020

- New Lisbon was awarded a Estação Imagem Award - Daily Life 2020

- Squatting Moms” was selected to exhibit in Photo Brussels 05 opening 20 November 2020