Matilde Viegas

Born 1990 in Porto/Portugal.

Matilde Viegas is a scientist and photographer living and working in Porto.

She finished her master’s studies in biochemistry at the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Porto, in 2014. She’s currently in the third year of her PhD in theoretical chemistry.

In 2008, she began photographing and has been self-taught ever since. Her practice is dedicated to documenting intimacy of those around her. Viegas photographs mostly in analog film. She’s a member of a local darkroom, called Grey Darkroom, where she’s been color printing, since late 2018.

From 2011 to 2016, she documented the relationship between her and her recently emigrated mother in a project called A Diary of Absence. In 2017, she was one of the organizers of the Ladies, Wine & Design meetings in Porto. In the same year, she began a personal project called Alento, documenting food and relationships established around the table. Part of the series was recently published in Iittala Journal #3.

In 2018, she was the recipient of a scholarship to attend the workshop Finding Intimacy led by Elinor Carucci, in New York/USA. There, she began a series focused on queer couples and their domesticity. The series is still in progress. In the same year, her work was selected for the Portfolio Review of the Encontros da Imagem Festival in Braga/Portugal.

In 2019, alongside the journalist and writer Viktoria Morasch, Viegas was prized the Gabriel-Grüner-Stipendium. The resulting work will be published in 2020.

Her works had been published in Die Zeit, Taz, Iittala Journal, Oh Comely Magazine, Vogue PT, among others. She also self-published five fanzines over the past decade.