There’s a shop doorway in Porto that I’d probably just walk past. But when Gökçe has put up her drawings and is sitting there among them, I stop. Somehow, it becomes a completely different place. Pictures hang from strings, smaller pieces sit between the larger ones, and she’s right there in the middle of it all. I think it draws a certain kind of person. It drew me in too.
I met her in the summer of 2025, when I was staying in Porto for a while. In the first photo I took of her, she’s wearing blue and talking to a man. I printed it out and took it to her.
She was so happy it brought tears to her eyes. It turned out I’d photographed what had been a really lovely day for her. The man in the photo was an American doctor, and they’d sat there talking for hours.
I soon understood how that could happen, because I ended up staying and talking to her for hours myself. Later, when I saw her on the street, I’d sometimes sit down there again. Some days we talked a lot, about all sorts of interesting things. On others, hardly at all. I just sat there and photographed people.
I liked being there. There was no need to keep moving on or to have something to say all the time. You could just be there.
I didn’t see her for a long time that summer
In 2026, I didn’t see Gökçe for quite a while. I wondered whether she’d moved somewhere else or simply left Porto. Natalia, whom I’d photographed dancing there before, had also moved a little way out of Porto. I thought perhaps Gökçe had done the same.
But at the end of August, before I left, we met again. We sat and talked for a long time, catching up on how we’d both been. At one point, she said to me:
“I’d like to look beautiful in a photo too.”
I took three portraits of her right there. They’re the three photos in this story where she’s wearing a black top. In one, she’s in front of her drawings; the others are a little closer. The same person I’d spent so much time sitting beside the summer before.
Three days later
Three days later, I brought her prints of those photos. I still find it hard to put her happiness into words. You could see it in her face, in her eyes and in the way her whole body reacted. Her eyes watered a little too.
She asked why I’d done it. Nobody had asked me to, or commissioned any photos.
I told her: “You said you wanted to look beautiful. I took these photos so you could see that you are beautiful.”
Then she went to show them to other people. To the woman at the iris photography studio next door, and to others too. It was lovely to see how much happiness those three photos brought her. And I came away feeling good too.
That’s why I wanted to write more about this encounter. I could just put the portraits on Instagram. But you’d miss the summer before, the long conversations and what happened three days after I took the photos.
This is how I like to photograph people, as part of getting to know them. We talk, and sometimes we sit quietly. And the photos come along too. Whenever I look at these three portraits now, I also remember Gökçe walking off with the prints in her hands to show them to other people.
You can find Gökçe’s drawings and paintings on Instagram: @arte_peregrine.