Edson Chagas was born on 1977 and is an Angolan photographer.
18 Facts About Edson Chagas
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Edson Chagas's Found Not Taken series resituates abandoned objects elsewhere within cities.
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Edson Chagas represented Angola at the 2013 Venice Biennale, for which he won its Golden Lion for best national pavilion.
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Edson Chagas's works have exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Brooklyn Museum.
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Edson Chagas's father studied aeronautics and his mother worked at a supermarket.
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Edson Chagas lived through the Angolan Civil War and recalled the need to be resourceful due to scarcity of goods.
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Edson Chagas's father sent him and his brother to Portugal for safety during the war, where they moved several times.
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Edson Chagas wanted to train as a cameraman but the class was focused on photography, not video.
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Edson Chagas began taking photos with his grandmother's compact camera and photography became a means for Chagas to understand himself, communicate, and stimulate thoughts about memories.
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Edson Chagas moved to the United Kingdom and received a degree in photojournalism from the London College of Communication.
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Edson Chagas studied documentary photography at the University of Wales, Newport.
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Edson Chagas said it took him many years to decide to professionalize as a photographer and began to transition from photojournalism to art photography in 2008.
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Edson Chagas has described his work as being interested how identity and consumerism are perceived in society.
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Edson Chagas started the series in 2008 while living in London and continued in other cities where he spent time: Newport, Wales, and Luanda, Angola.
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Edson Chagas exhibited photographs from Found Not Taken to represent Angola at the country's first Venice Biennale national pavilion in 2013, curated by Paula Nascimento and Stephano Rabolli Pansera.
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Edson Chagas's exhibition placed on the floor poster-sized photographs of discarded objects positioned in relation to weathered architecture in the Angolan capital, Luanda.
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Edson Chagas showed selections at exhibitions at the Paris Photo fair, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tate Modern.
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In 2017 and 2018, Edson Chagas captured photographs of the abandoned Fabrica Irmaos Carneiro textile factory in Luanda, which he showed in Lisbon in 2022.