About Me — Miguel Feuggin

Photograph is my most enduring passion hobby. It has been for most of my adult life and it’s a trade I come back to explore and share my pictures every so often either online, submitting to photo contests or public exhibits. This is a self-portrait style story that is very much related to my livings related to shooting artistic.

First in my catalog is what I suppose would be my first self portrait taken with a photographer awareness. I’m wearing my gold and purple Lakers t-shirt so should be 13 years old, around 1990. It’s taken in a reflection of a jewelry display at Palácio da Bolsa in oPorto. It was taken on a school trip to the birthplace of Portugal, Guimarães and oPorto. To this day I’m still guessing how my father allowed me to take his Canon, he really should be in a great mood. Also in the picture the Silma Bosch SB20 flash is shown. Nowadays I’m using it as the flash in my Nikon FM2. No sync cable needed, just plug’n’play . It’s amazing how technology related to photo equipment is so standard.

Very soon I took the task on hopefully being the faithful depository of my ancestors cameras and negatives. It was only after my grand father passed away that I discovered his passion for photography by hearing stories from my grandmother. He used the lightless pantry of his home to direct print the negatives 1:1. I believe to own the light he used to do the printing. Just an open end cube box light easy to control and get an homogeneous light source. I have his friends and family photo albums and the enlargement is 1:1 so I believe to be right in this assumption. His camera was the Zeiss Ikon Box Tengor 1:9 lens Goerz Frontar in the family cameras image and the first negatives I have from him I would place them in the 1950s. Family trips but there are also shots of some very amused wine loaded friends parties taken in some Monte Alentejano.

My father was a image technologist in the seventies and eighties so with the rise of home video recording it naturally became his preferred hobby. It is astonishing to go back and imagining at how he handled the craftsmanship by examining his equipment to cut and mount the 16mm recordings. I remember trips to France and Italy loading the heavy-lifting Philips V2000 Cameras and video players. Finnally the VHS format arrived and along the VHS-C format camera and our shoulders were thankful. The pinnacle of tech for my father was the twenty-one pin cable. I remember lectures from him on this topic, and all the video and audio adaptors it involved, in order to get it just rightly connected to his many devices. Video players, recorders, title and captions editing hubs, television were all integrated in my father’s laboratory.

My father passed away in May 2021.

I was born in Viseu, a small town of twenty thousand people in the center east of Portugal. In historic tales it is the home of Lusitano warriors that fought the conquest of their homeland by the romans. My house was at that time in plain countryside so that we and my cousins were able to explore the forests, know the time to ripe the pine nuts, arbutus berry and know the best places to bath in the rivers close by like Rio Dão. Then in 1995 I started attending college in the Portuguese capital Lisbon; Chemical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico.

In winter 1999 I started Grade I of Art photography at the Section for Art Photography (NAF) at the student’s union. Above is my first self portrait for the final work. My partners really gave good critics on it in the classes. It’s a one try shot and the depth of field really allows to appreciate all plains of the photography. The composition has lot of parts that are important for me at this time. Above is a composition of ocean photos badly ink printed. In the back center right a stand of four photos of me, my parents and brother. The ashtray in front I still remember the day it was broken beyond glueing or repair. I wore Doc Martens from the age of 14 to 22. Besides the obvious style, they were great all round boots to wear. Normally it would be my only shoes for the year. Bought with the first bad weather in September they were great for protection when riding the bike in my teenage years, sometimes they would reach the Summer like low-boots by cutting the leather of the shin.

My surname is not Feuggin, I’m Miguel Pereira. Feuggin is a mix of Miguel spelled in backwards (LeugiM) and Feijão, which was my mother’s father nickname. Lately it became the known family name where I come from in Viseu. For showing my art I have been using Feuggin since 2002.

Entering the photographic section was a life changing event together with the friendships we made that last to this day. Next year, 2000, I started level II of our courses and also joined the board as artistic and activities director. I was fully minded in getting the job done, financial situation was good so the president decided we should reform the place. It was our best starting decision. Just cleaning up and have the facilities we needed for classes and receive appointments. NAF has lasted since the 1950’s. Ever so start of the year the student’s union schedules a meeting to get us out but they are still there as there has always been the idea that financial independence was paramount. The laboratory had always been in a good shape so we had little concern on that important part. We had a good contract with a still famous Lisbon photo shop that kept the laboratory consumables budget really low.

Técnico is a college full of great people. We did work for the student union but our best partner was the theater group next door. We supported them in documenting their performances. They were available when we had some idea for a work and needed models. It is simpler when you can take shots of people who have good knowledge of their body and facial expression and that could stripe a pose better than you had in our mind.

At the photographic section we struggled for sixth months sending faxes and attending to meetings to get support and budget to produce an exhibit but we were out of luck or being less considered. It was my first lesson that somehow hard work always pays off. I got requested to a low expectation meeting with the college board which finally was a full house gathering. There the dean and college management were deciding the celebrations of an important anniversary. In the end I got out with a request to produce two collective photo exhibits and also additional photo work for the section to produce, and cash in, for the catalogues and general publicity of the event.

We called up on current and former contributors to the section and put together for our group a decent collection of seven artist artworks, spreading from Lisbon to London. I had been starting shooting for one year and was still well behind, so decided to stand aside and better be an independent producer for the year. In spring-summer 2001, to you I remind it was a time that was still of innocence, two shows were out together with the paper catalogues of the expositions.

For me it was the opportunity to work to know one of the top personality in Portuguese culture of this days in my opinion. Professor Jorge Calado, breather of new scientific areas in Portugal in the area of chemistry from the sixties on, opera critic and top collector in photography in our country was to be the curator of the exhibitions. Me, and my partner in crime, Paulo, were able to spend time with Jorge, deciding the plans, catalogues and texts for our own contributors exhibit and for a retrospective of artists that had connections to the university.

Alongside this year I also attended a half-year to Jorge Calado’s “Art, Technology and Society” class. In the end I produced a dissertation on a perspective of art photography mostly exploring on the concepts of Barthes. I did two other iteration on this work, in 2012 and this last months. My final one with a new series of photos taken in Paris is in this story:

By this days of 2001 I was listening to the Pink Floyd discography. My next proposal is a selfie tribute to music and my favorite bands. For my top three recording of this band I name “Animals” for the lyrics, the studio and live recordings of “Ummagumma” and the loud female voices in “Dark Side of the Moon”. For the rest of my favorite bands I must name Radiohead, Sonic Youth and the bands where Josh Homme performs, such as Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age and Them Crooked Voultures.

Following this period it was time to finish college. I graduated in Chemical Engineering in 2002. My routine during college was to be in Lisbon to attend school but on weekends I would inevitably spend in my hometown, Viseu. I used to carry my camera with me at all times, I shot with a Nikon F80 mostly the the 50mm 1.4 lens. My favorite film was the Kodak Tri-X Pan. I had done the the zone system to get the correct development times on my camera. For this film I did the procedure for the zone system in 400 ASA and pushed to 1600. I also did it for the T-MAX 100 but rarely used it. I love the contrast and the grain of the T-X Pan. Friends were my best model. Viseu is a small town and for the weekend me and 3 more friends started Saturday with a long bike ride along the valley of Rio Dão and next played football in the afternoon. We had a strange football match where everybody was invited. So we had players that ranged from around six years old to people in the sixties. It was supposed to be a field for a five against five match but most of the times we were more than 12 on each side. We did it for the fun of it and also as a gathering place for everybody to get together.

My friends were my favorite models. They were happy to go along and provide me with moments to capture in pictures and I used great pictures we took together in two photo exhibits I did in this years. We would go at night to the riverside where we could be alone and have fun for ourselves. Running water provides great effects on long exposures at night.

In 2010 I started shooting in medium format. I use a Mamiya RB67 Pro. The RB stands for rotating back because the back rotates ninety degrees so you can do both portrait and landscape. It’s a renowned camera for studio work and taking it out isn’t an easy task due to the size and weight. But still you can shoot it without a tripod. It was by this time that I started to be interested in multiple exposures on the same negative. Medium format is great for this as the details possible to capture in this area of film is so much more compared to 35mm films. The RB67 can use multiple film holders. I normally use two or three loaded at the same time so I have a greater option to select the next exposure on an already exposed frame. I usually take notes on what was the last shot but sometimes still they get mixed. The story bellow has some examples. The shots that appear are part of a group I submitted to a contest in 2011 and won an exhibition at an art gallery at oPorto.

Until 2009 I had been working as a Engineer at my home town in Viseu. But it was time to change. I got some training in information systems and move to Lisbon with my family to become a software developer. I was thirty one and decided to go back and restart in a job where I enjoyed myself. Besides believing in working hard to get what you want I am a living proof that doing what you enjoy will take you to success. I had a quick rise and now have a calmer job where I mostly do programming to invent new ways to overcome problems. Still is not boring for me.

I am now forty six and decided to have a try and propose my art to people so this I why I started writing in Medium this year. Most of my stories have the art of photography and technical aspects to get the job done. I have used themes in physics and geology in my stories also. Mostly my pictures are the focal point.

Given that multiple exposures are my main area of research when I take pictures I finish this introduction of myself with one.

All images were scanned from negatives . If you are curious I have the following story on the technique I use.