Daniel Botelho
Hans Lucas
Brussels, Belgium
I was born and raised in Brazil from where I moved abroad at age eleven due to my father’s work. I have been traveling the world ever since, having lived in fourteen countries and I'm now based in Brussels. I studied journalism in Suffolk University in Boston and film in the University of Barcelona, after a few years in the film industry I decided to take up humanitarian labor where my relationship with photography was sealed. I am fluent in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.
My work with humanitarian labor has brought me into photojournalism and documentary photography, having documented, among other crisis situations, the living conditions of Syrian civilians in Aleppo and Idlib, and Central African civilians in Bangui during the civil war. Photography is to me a way to comment on the human condition and advocate for social change. Human isolation and alienation in the modern metropolis and the paradoxical in our society are recurrent themes in my work. I am now working on an essay about forced migration and asylum seekers in Calais and in Belgium, my new home, and am constantly on the road continuing my work of social advocacy and documenting.
I became a member of Studio Hans Lucas in 2015.
- Breaking news
- Conflict
- Crisis
- Editorial
- Medical
- Military embed
- Portrait
- Reporting
- RISC training
- Video capture
- Portuguese
- French
- Spanish
- English
Stranded between two shores (on going)
Daniel Botelho
The refugee settlement near the port of Calais is fast turning into a slum. Refugee settlements have existed for nearly twenty years in Calais, this is the fourth location and the one that has seen the greatest number of refugees, now more than six thousand. Most of the refugees in the north of France have no more resources to move on further so they wait for the increasingly difficult possibility to cross the tunnel onto their promised land being stuck in deplorable conditions in refugee camps, they're not in France and they'll probably never make it to Britain.
Cuba - No es Facil
Daniel Botelho
The Cuban myth has lived on for decades now, malcontent inhabitants of countries swept over by capitalism often glorify and idolize the Cuban social system without ever taking a clinical look at the workings of this isolated society, it is perhaps this isolation that keeps people from seeing how Cubans really live. More often than not, and despite the promised opening as a consequence of the recommencong of the diplomatic relations between US and Cuba, when they tried to explain about their reality in socialist Cuba the phrase "No es facil" ("It ain't easy") came up.
Central African Republic: Testimonies of Chaos
Daniel Botelho
The project documents the lives of eight people, all of them residents in Neighborhoods in Bangui that underwent the worst violence and destruction, it was carried out in 2014 and was conceived as a multimedia work consisting in photographic documenting, and the recording of spoken testimonies in order to allow each person to relate their experiences and their views about the country’s situation.