Sofia Costa

Lisbon is a city you climb before you understand it. I started in Alfama, early, when the laundry was already out and the only traffic was a man carrying bread up a staircase. The streets fold into each other and then double back. My map gave up first. My legs followed around noon.

Most of what I shot here is small. A wall of tiles that has been cracking politely for two hundred years. Half a pastel de nata, because the other half was gone before I thought of the camera. The light off the Tagus does most of the work. It is soft and milky in the morning, gold late in the afternoon, and kind to anyone who stops walking for a minute and lets the city come to them.