A photographer’s journey in Porto

Excerpts from an interview with Maksym Kaharlytskyi.
Interviewed by Néstor Romero Clemente.

I moved here with my wife and my son from Ukraine in 2016. So we’ve been living here for about four years now. It was a nice decision to come here because Porto experienced a tourism boom a couple of years ago. And with tourism came a lot of work in portrait and holiday photography.  

The pandemic came as a big impact to my profession. All of a sudden, no one was coming to Porto so nobody required my services. I had a lot of cancellations from tourists, as well as commercial projects abroad, in Germany and so on. Thanks to the fact that I have a second profession, as a web developer, I managed to switch most of my work to that field quite quickly.

Meanwhile, as a photographer, I looked for other areas that could remain active at the time, for example the real state sector or the stock photography marketplace. This last one triggered me to start a process of discovering new places in our immediate surrounding, and I began taking photos of the area. I shortly started making a list of nearby places by locating them first in Google maps, and now it’s become a sort of checklist. It’s actually been a nice experience. I was surprised by the variety of places that I could find so close to home. Doing this has given me a lot of room for improvement and experimenting. I got to further know the country that has been my home for the past four years.

I personally have learned that we have to be flexible. We need to work on the ability to diversify our skills. For example, being able to operate online is a big advantage for people like me. If we have such an opportunity, we can stay and work from home. Like many other creatives, before the pandemic I already worked a lot from home, so it wasn’t too difficult to adapt myself to this new situation. Emotionally, it’s been a very important thing for me to stay calm and keep working on new projects. I didn’t want to focus on what I couldn’t do but on what I could do. And this meant to be doing something new, under new circumstances.

The situation in Portugal and Ukraine has been dealt with in very different ways. In Portugal everything has been quite calm. I haven’t seen any panic nor social distress. We were planning to visit Ukraine this year but we have decided to postpone the trip because you never know what could happen, for instance we could get stuck in Ukraine. I’m a citizen of Ukraine living in Portugal, and from both sides, I’m not sure what political decisions will be made in the coming months, and what consequences those decisions will have when they happen while I’m in one country or the other. For now we’ve decided that it’s probably safer for us to stay where we are at the moment. And keep an eye on the situation.