Available for Commissions
Based in Costa de Caparica, Portugal
michael@rupp-media.com
+351 927 399 421
Based in Lisbon, born in Germany and raised in South Africa, his work is shaped by lived experience, curiosity, and the perspective of someone who has learned to look at places both from within and from the outside. He is interested in people beyond fixed opinions or easy judgment, understanding how life appears through another person’s eyes.
For thirteen years, he worked as a director of photography and filmmaker across commercial work, fashion, advertising, music videos, and visual storytelling. Over time, he began to feel that this world no longer held the meaning he was looking for. The work became increasingly distant from real life, from people, and from the kind of human truth that first drew him to image-making.
Since 2025, he has focused on documentary photography, finding renewed meaning and purpose in slower, more attentive work. His projects include a body of work on the Arte Xávega fishermen of Costa da Caparica, exhibited in Lisbon and Costa da Caparica, with its first photobook sold out; a long-term photographic project inside a Candomblé and Umbanda terreiro in Portugal; and Keeping the Lights On, a constructed documentary project made from illegally dumped household waste and the domestic lives still attached to it.
He enters lives and communities with care and respect, reading situations closely and allowing encounters to unfold without force. His photographs move between observation and intimacy, revealing the gestures, silences, and traces through which people become visible
He is drawn to projects that take him into worlds far from his own, regardless of geography, where being a stranger matters as much as being accepted. His work tries to show people’s lived experiences with honesty, consent, and care, while remaining aware of what it means for someone to be photographed. For him, photography is not only a way of showing others, but a way of understanding what their lives reveal about the world and about himself.
