“In 2013, with dwindling assignments from the newspapers and magazines for which he worked, Augusto Brázio, a freelance photographer, began to wander the streets of Lisbon. He soon discovered innumerable stores with closed shutters. In the centre of Lisbon and surrounding suburbs, in Porto, the Algarve and all over Northern Portugal, thousands of stores had closed. Some still had a “Back soon!” sign on the door while others had clearly been abandoned.
Due to the combined effects of the new Urban Rent Act (which makes it easier to evict tenants), diminishing consumption and higher taxes, stores face increasingly unviable economic conditions. On the other hand, owners want to renovate their properties and make the most of the droves of tourists visiting Portugal. They want to build boutique hotels, open gourmet stores or sell traditional products in sophisticated packaging."
a series of 90 b/w photographs of empty or abandoned interiors, either stripped clean or cluttered with the belongings of the last occupants, sometimes these eery tombs have remained undisturbed, sometimes passersby have intervened, either by wrecking the place or by making a temporary home of their own in these empty shells, edited by Agusto Brázio, Patrícia Almeida and David-Alexandre Guéniot, text in Portuguese and English, soft cover in printed slip case, 23 x 16 cm, 180 not numbered pages, ed/300, Lisbon 2014
ISBN: 978-989-98298-4-8
