Apu Gomes is an experienced 39-year-old photojournalist specializing in social conflict with more than one decade of visually compelling work covering the news and the people. During his nine years with the Brazilian newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, Gomes situated himself and captured forever-changing events such as the Libyan Civil War, in 2011 and the controversial US-Iran Nuclear Program Treaty in Tehran.

Born in Caratinga, a small town in Minas Gerais State, Brazil, Gomes moved to São Paulo at the age of five in the 80’s, when the drugs and crime scenes were really high. As an eyewitness to the violent nature of his surroundings, he developed a true passion for photography. While working as a motorcycle courier in São Paulo, he developed a habit to always carry a camera with him, mainly to photograph the city life scenes. Gomes reflects, that his career as a photographer is partly due to a colleague, Guto de Lima, a photographer who Apu used to work with as a courier until he himself encouraged Apu to buy his first camera, a 1970 Canon FTb with a 50mm lens. He then decided to take his first photography class while still working at the same marketing agency.

In 2006, Gomes caught the attention of the BBC News with his report on Brazil’s very own Gold Rush. He photographed the detrimental living conditions and the grave sacrifices made by miners in the hunt for wealth and prosperity in the Amazon Rain Forest.

Gomes made his start with Folha de S.Paulo staff in 2007, where his photo-essay “Cracolandia”, exposed the true nature of a zone in downtown São Paulo, notorious for its heavy use of crack-cocaine. Gomes portrayed the mixed and crude urban reality of the city while maintaining a sensible and poetic version of the city’s nights and shadows.

He traveled to the USA to document New Orleans’ rebuilding project five years after Hurricane Katrina, in addition, covering the Drugs War during the military occupation of the favelas Complexo do Alemão in 2010 and in Rocinha in 2011, both occurring in Rio de Janeiro city, Brazil.

During the Arab Spring, Folha de S.Paulo sent Gomes twice to Libya to cover the war. The first was between March and April 2011, when NATO has backed a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya and began a military offensive against Gaddafi’s dictatorial regime. Then, in August 2011, during the fall of the capital, Tripoli he came back to the country.

 Two years later, Gomes was assigned to Iran, spending three weeks in Tehran to produce a series of news reports about Iranian society, exclusively for Folha de São Paulo, paving the way for  “Os Iranianos” by Samy Adghirni, a published book.

He worked on the coverage of the football World Cup in Brazil in 2014, and in 2015 he started working as a correspondent in California, USA, covering news for  “Folha de S.Paulo” newspaper, Globo TV, BBC and El Pais “newspaper” from Spain.

In 2017 he was invited to work for Agence France-Presse in Brazil, during this time he covered the drugs war in Rio de Janeiro, soccer games and the Rock in Rio Festival. A multimedia story about the Waiapi Indigenous People in The Amazon, that he suggested, produced and shot along two AFP colleagues ended up being one of the agency’s highlights in Brazil.  Later that year, he settled for the second time in Los Angeles and continued to work for AFP.

The Press Photographer Association of the Greater Los Angeles awarded him in 2020 with the First Place for Web News Feature for the multimedia story, The Guardians of the Amazon that he produce about the Waiapi Indigenous People in the previous year, broadcasted in all CNN platforms.

In February of 2021, Apu Gomes released his first book “Kindergarten”. With the introduction words of Mano Brown the book is inspired by the community, the water and his cultural identity, using photography as an instrument for social, environmental and ultimately human change.