When I was 19, I landed an internship or more accurately, became the assistant to the assistant at Valor Econômico, a newly launched financial newspaper in São Paulo, Brazil. My days were filled with fetching coffee, picking up snacks from the cafeteria for the senior staff, running upstairs to the darkroom to deliver and retrieve slides, scanning images, answering the ever-ringing phones, and organizing thousands of negatives and slides in the archives. I even got pranked a few times - from running around all seven floors of the building looking for 'focus powder' to rushing off to shoot the 'cold front' supposedly arriving at the airport. That year and a half in the newsroom was, without question, the best education I could have hoped for.

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Eventually, I was offered a staff photographer position, focusing mainly on portraiture. Not long after, I left for Mozambique — my first experience working solo and also the first time I tried to tell a story of my own through images. As it often goes, the first project didn’t quite work out. Neither did the second, already back in Brazil.

 

It was on the third attempt — just a 20 minute car ride from my mother’s apartment in São Paulo — that I shot my first book: "In a Window of Prestes Maia 911 Building", the result of a four-year journey.

 

Having spent my childhood in São Paulo and my teenage years in New York, I’ve long been fascinated by the ways we inhabit our cities and how and why we live as we do. For the past 23 years, photography has been the language through which I’ve explored social and political questions that emerge from these relationships between people and the spaces we occupy.

 

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a diverse group of galleries, publishers, editors, and commercial clients, each one shaping my path in meaningful ways.

 

Today, I live between Paris, São Paulo and Normandie and am currently represented by Galeria Lume in São Paulo and Galeria da Gávea in Rio de Janeiro. 

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Julio Bittencourt was born in Brazil and grew up between Sao Paulo and New York.

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Through photography, video and installations, his projects explore themes of urban life, identity and the social issues derived from the relationships between people and their environment.

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His works have been exhibited in galleries and museums in more than twenty countries and his work published in magazines such as LFI, Foam Magazine, GEO, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Courrier International, The British Journal of Photography, Polka Magazine, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Esquire, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, C Photo, GQ, Leica World Magazine and L'Insense, among others.

 

Bittencourt is the author of three books: “In a window of Prestes Maia 911 Building”, "Ramos" and "Dead Sea". ​

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He currently lives between Paris, São Paulo and Normandie and is represented by Galeria Lume in São Paulo and Galeria da Gávea in Rio de Janeiro.