Meet the Angola team

"Many people in Angola seem accustomed to the clicking of cameras, especially in the poorer areas in town. They generally insist on their right to know why they are being photographed. "A journalist? From Europe? Well then I want to see your press card," one trader said to me at the already closed market in Cazenga, the most densely populated area of the Angolan capital, Luanda. While these are valid demands, they make it difficult to take non-staged photos, and to break down clichés.

What impressed me particularly in Angola were the contrasts of a country in transition. On the one hand, the wealth in Luanda Bay, which need not shy comparison with major cities in industrialised countries. And on the other hand, the corrugated-iron shacks in the poor districts. In Luanda I was also confronted with memories of my own past. The contrasts in the Angolan capital reminded me of my childhood in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo: No horizon, no skyline, but an endlessly growing city with more and more skyscrapers. They draw your gaze upwards and often let you forget the children begging down below in the streets."