Alex Salim - Documentary Photographer

Native of Lavras, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and radicated in the city of São Paulo since 1984, Alex Salim, graduated in land-surveying engineering, followed also agricultural and geologic engineering. Abandoning this profession, however, he devoted himself exclusively to photography in the eighties

Spellbound by baroque and rococo art and architecture, he started photographing Brazilian colonial towns. Salim possesses one of the most important photographic archives of the colonial towns of Minas and presently devotes himself, over and above to the Baroque and Rococo of the Brazilian colonial towns, to the Baroque and Rococo in several parts of the world, always with the orientation of specialized professors and researchers.

Beside this, Alex Salim started a project to disclose features of the negro culture which are little known in the great centres of the Brazilian South-East, in order to preserve the ethnic cultural identity. In this manner, the celebration of the Congado dos Negros de Nossa Senhora do Rosário e São Benedito (Congado of the Negros of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict) is a subject which he also has followed and chronicled for more than fifteen years.

He owns an image-bank with diversified themes including also fauna and flora, towns of Brazil, South America, Europe and the Middle East. This bank adds up more than 60.000 pictures in slides (chromos), besides negatives in colour and black and white, produced in size 35mm. 6x7 and 4x5.

Alex Salim has taken part in exhibitions in cultural centres of Brazil, Denmark, Italy and England. Besides, he has published in several national and international vehicles, as there are the Time-USA and Panorama-Panama.

In 2003 and 2005 he recorded the country of his grandparents, Lebanon. There, his pictures tracked down the restored architecture and the millenary culture of Phoenician provenance, besides landscapes, cookery and works of art.

During the year 2005 Salim photographed Baroque and Rococo in several towns of Portugal, Italy, Germany, France and also Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

His work is requested by advertising agencies and editors of schoolbooks. It also serves various concerns of public and private branches of activities, producing pictures in institutional and editorial fields.