Issue 10: Kioskzine Feature: Augusto Brázio

Spotlight

Augusto Brázio — A Reframed a Republic

Augusto Brázio is one of nine photographers featured in Kioskzine 6.0. His contribution to the zine, published in January 2023, revisits a series originally produced for the Centenary of the Portuguese Republic — part of a public commission titled Diário da República. In this new form, Brázio strips the images from their institutional framing and re-presents them with “a new sequence and other clothes,” as José Farinha put it during our 2023 interview. Not quite a republic of the past, and not exactly the present either — it’s a re-edit that becomes, in many ways, a re-reading.

The response was immediate. The special edition sold out quickly, and the work was added to the Kioskzine exhibitions at Fórum da Maia and IPI Lisboa. Farinha described the collaboration as “very, very interesting” — and it’s easy to see why. Brázio’s practice is difficult to pin down: he moves between documentary and fiction, poetry and precision, often blending flash-lit intimacy with a deep curiosity about place and people.

His website opens a door into a strange, luminous world. Cota 470, from 2003, documents what seem to be miners or night laborers. The light is harsh, direct, necessary — but strangely beautiful. Bang, in contrasty black and white, becomes abstract and theatrical: intimacy in high relief. Works like Sopé, Rasgo, and Sor — part of the long-term project Viagens na Minha Terra — offer a night-side view of Portugal’s interior, where faces emerge like apparitions from the dark. It’s not just portraiture — it’s presence.

Even his quieter work — such as Vende-se, a series on closed stores across Lisbon, Porto, and the Algarve — feels charged with disappearance. It’s a kind of portraiture too, just without people. He photographs what remains — sometimes strange façades, sometimes bodies in motion, sometimes nothing at all — with theatrical lighting and an uncanny eye for suspended moments. The photographs resist categorization. They’re fragmentary, often ambiguous, and always meticulous. One might say they’re informed by unease — but they’re also undeniably seductive.

Brázio was born in 1964 in Brinches (Serpa) and studied at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes in Lisbon. After a career in photojournalism, he shifted toward long-form, reflective projects. He’s published over ten books and shown work across Portugal and Europe. His projects are often described as personal, yet they carry a collective resonance — quietly reconfiguring the visual archive of the country itself.

His images rarely come with captions. As he once said, images should speak for themselves. It’s an ethos that runs through his work and helps explain why his collaboration with Kioskzine felt so natural. Even when working with state-commissioned images, Brázio finds a way to loosen the official frame. What’s left behind is something more open: a republic of photographs, reordered.

Kioskzine’s mission to create tactile, lasting documents is vividly present in this edition. As José Farinha put it, “We want these fanzines to sit on your shelf, to be rediscovered years later.” With just 150 copies printed, each issue is both a collector’s object and a vessel for reflection.

Through our editorial partnership, Galeria Local’s newsletter continues to highlight artists like Augusto Brázio and Pauliana Valente Pimentel, inviting a deeper engagement with contemporary documentary practices. We hope this collaboration will extend into future events and exhibitions — opening space for these visual narratives to resonate in print, on the wall, and in conversation.