Alfredo Cuha

Alfredo Cunha (born 8 October 1953 in Celorico da Beira, Portugal) is widely celebrated as one of Portugal’s foremost photographers, with a distinguished career that spans more than five decades.

He began his professional life in 1970 in advertising and commercial photography. Shortly thereafter (in 1971), he moved into photojournalism, joining the newspaper Notícias da Amadora.
From these commercial roots, he developed a photographic practice that would embrace both documentary immediacy and enduring aesthetic clarity.

Although Alfredo Cunha is often associated with photojournalism, his work as a photographer goes beyond mere reportage. He has always favoured black-and-white imagery as a deliberate aesthetic choice, crafting photographs where form, light and human presence converge with subtle power.
His imagery is characterised by a humanist gaze, attending to ordinary people, social change, and the unfolding of history, yet rendered with compositional care and often poetic restraint, making his photographs relevant both as documents and as works of art.

Cunha’s oeuvre covers a wide field:

• Early on, he documented major moments in Portuguese history, including the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, producing images that remain among the most enduring visual testimonies of that day.

• He also followed the Portuguese decolonisation process in Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor and Cape Verde) and later international conflicts and humanitarian crises.

• Yet alongside historic reportage, his artistic photography explores identity, memory, Portugal’s landscape and its people, forging a long-term archive that functions at once as social document and aesthetic project.

With more than 30 photo-books to his name and over 700 exhibitions of his work, Alfredo Cunha’s photographic output is both prolific and consequential.

He inaugurated the Cycle Momentum at Ochre Space, underscoring his enduring role as a defining photographic voice in Portugal.