“I went to court cause I burned down a real state agency. I broke the window with a brick. Poured some petrol inside, lit up the fire and walked away. It felt good. It felt really good. I remember when I got home I dreamt I killed a snake – and I had always been afraid of snakes.”

Combining the roughest technique in photography with the latest technology, Gui Mohallem (www.guimohallem.com) uses digital pinhole photography along with biographical stories to create a series of delicate portraits of ‘madness’.

Digital pinhole photography replaces the lens of an SLR camera with a modified body cap allowing the image to form within a dark chamber as with a traditional pinhole camera while capturing that image with a digital sensor rather than with film emulsion.

By eliminating the lens in the shoot as well as aggregating extracts of his subjects’ reports on love, sex and death, the photographer proposes an uncommon bond between him, the viewer and the subjects photographed. An exquisite sense of proximity develops, and the public is invited to share in these intimacies.

Gui Mohallem is a graduate of University of São Paulo where he specialized in cinematography. As an educator with organizations offering career opportunities to under-privileged youth in Brazil, gUi adapted the pinhole technique as a “didactic resource to teach principles about light, photography and the joys of self-discovery.”

Gui Mohallem is represented in Brazil by Galeria de Babel which also represents Martin Parr, Elliott Erwitt and Thomas Hoepker in Latin America.