João Miguel Barros
João Miguel Barros (Lisbon, 1958) is a lawyer, a profession he has practised in Lisbon and Macau. Between 1979 and 1982, he was co-director of SEMA, a magazine dedicated to culture and the visual arts, published in Lisbon (www.revistasema.pt).
From 2017 onwards, he began presenting his photographic work, with solo exhibitions at Creative Macau – Centre for Creative Industries (2017); Museu Coleção Berardo – Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (2018); Macau Contemporary Art Center – Navy Yard No. 1 (2019); Albergue SCM, Macau (2019); Fundação Rui Cunha, Macau (2020); and the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon (2023). He has also participated in several group exhibitions and, in 2021, was selected to represent Macau at the International Art Biennale of Macau with the work Allegory of Globalisation. He has received several distinctions in international photography competitions (www.jmb.photo/brief-cv-awards).
Also from 2017 onwards, he began publishing his work with three photobooks: Between Gaze and Hallucination (self-published, 2017); Photo-Scripts – 14 short stories (Museu Coleção Berardo, 2018); and Photo-Scripts – 12 short stories (Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Macao SAR Government, 2019). In early 2020, he launched Zine Photo (www.zine.photo), a publishing project dedicated to his own work, conceived as a 12-issue series and concluded in January 2023. In December 2020, Photo London Academy devoted issue 32 of its magazine to his work and projects.
João Miguel Barros is also an independent curator of contemporary photography. In this capacity, he was selected, together with artists Ung Vai Meng and Chan Hin Io, to represent Macau at the 59th Venice Biennale. He was also elected the first president of Halftone – Macau Photographic Association for the 2021–2022 term.
He is the founder of Ochre Space (www.ochrespace.com) in Lisbon, a centre dedicated to contemporary photography, comprising a bookshop, a publishing imprint, and an art gallery where he has promoted exhibitions of photography and video art by international artists.
