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Fernando Guerra has been a pioneer in the way architecture is photographed and divulged. Fifteen years ago, he opened studio FG+SG together with his brother, and both are responsible in large part for the diffusion of Portuguese contemporary architecture in the last fifteen years.

Fernando Guerra is an architectural photographer. His training, however, is as an architect. His gaze is divided between two distinct modes of constructing the world. Given this fact, he is in a prime position to personify the metamorphosis of the field of photography that will lead the practice of creating images to eventually identify itself, in part, with the field of architecture.

In order to understand a space, architects, possibly with a more conscious intentionality than mere users, walk about the buildings. They capture the spatiality of architecture by wandering, scrutinizing, and associating ideas, shapes, dimensions. It is through this movement that they discover the infinite variables of the architectural space, the singularities that distinguish a significant place from the myriad of insignificant constructions that invade our visual field. And they do it by blending what they see with the memories of other buildings they carry with them, often acquired through observation mediated by photography. Our architectural culture, given the impossibility of visiting all of the buildings in the world, is constructed mainly through the eyes of others. It is in this sense that Fernando Guerra casts a generous eye upon the architecture he registers. Among the buildings he photographs, it is not exactly a value judgment on architectural content that is perceived, but rather an examination, at the emotional level, that seeks to homogenize all of the registers. Thus, what is cultivated is the absence of any critical moralism that might interfere with the image's final result and that seeks to position itself (architecturally) on a neutral plane, becoming useful in its own right. It is simultaneously a world in which better or worse architectures do not exist. The photographer, contrary to the photographer-artist, is summoned and responds through his knowledge as an expert. If he manipulates the image, that is, if any excess of "realism" is removed from it, he does it conscious of the fact that he works in a field of impartiality.

Fernando Guerra's work is regularly published in various national and international publications, in magazines such as Casabella, Wallpaper*, Dwell, Icon, Domus, A + U, among many others. FG+SG collaborates with various Portuguese architects such as Álvaro Siza, Carlos Castanheira, Manuel Mateus, Manuel Graça Dias, Gonçalo Byrne, ARX Portugal, João Luís Carrilho da Graça, Promontório Arquitectos, as well as international architects such as Márcio Kogan, Isay Weifeld, Arthur Casas, Zaha Hadid, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, among others.

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