Prior to his studies in photojournalism in
London and in documentary photography in Newport, Edson Chagas spent most of
his life in Luanda, the capital of Angola. He was born in this city in 1977, two
years after the start of the civil war, and it was here that he returned after
his European experiences. The importance of the three cities in the artist’s
biography is shown by the photographs in the series Found Not Taken, begun in 2008. The shots portray everyday objects
abandoned along the roadside, some still in good condition, others worn out or
half-destroyed. Chagas gathers them during his urban explorations and places
them in a new context, in order to then photograph them against carefully
chosen backgrounds, of which he exploits the patterns and chromatic contrasts. [...]
