In May 2011 I was searching for a project that involved photographing people and making them part of the process. I wanted it to be a collaboration and the output should reflect that intent. The first choice I made was gender. I decided quickly that I was only going to photograph women.

Why is this focused on women? 

Being raised by my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother had a major role in my education. With them, I could see life unfolding through the perspective of strong women, who put love into everything they did, and that molded my personality in unmistakable ways.

But I needed something more to make this project interesting enough to stand out.

A casual talk with Telma Teixeira at the Lisbon Book Fair, a fellow Twitter user that loves to read and kept a blog about it, helped me a great deal to decide the project’s form.

It was going to be focused on books, but as I intended to show a bit of the inner world of the portrayed person, it had to be a book with a special meaning to them.

It should be the first book that changed them.

But I also wanted to have their voice on the project, to know why they chose that book, so I asked each one of them to write a text about it to publish with the pictures.

When asked what this project is about, I always say that it’s about the transforming power of art.

Some books shake you so deeply that you are never the same, after we read them. The ones that left an undying mark, and we will never forget.

It can be a novel, an essay, a comic book, or even a children’s book; they all were agents of change to these book-loving women.

Books change you, this project portraits some of those changes.

In June 2011, the Book Loving Girls project was born on Tumblr, in 2020 I built a site for them.

One hundred and eight book lovers later, I feel grateful to all of them for allowing me to enter a bit of their world.

The complete series is available on the project website.