GUSTAVO CHAMS


GUSTAVO
CHAMS

For Gustavo Chams, fashion photography is grounded in identity, ritual, and culture. Raised primarily by his mother in Brazil’s industrial belt within an immigrant family of Lebanese and Italian factory workers, his childhood was an uncommon crossroads of diaspora traditions, cultures, and sacred imagery. His home was shaped by Umbanda rituals—infused with Yoruba symbolism and his mother’s Lebanese Muslim roots—alongside Spiritist séances and a traditional Catholic family line. Paired with his teenage years in the underground queer movement, this tension between sacred iconography, ceremony, and anti-establishment defiance remains central to his visual language. 

His relationship with the medium began on the ground: working in a photo lab at fourteen, shooting weddings through his teens, and running his own commercial studio in Brazil before signing his first fashion magazine cover at nineteen. Moving to Canada to study design, he spent the following decade navigating advertising agencies and fashion houses, rising from designer and photographer to Creative Director. That chapter gave him a fluency in high-level narrative strategy and widened his operational scope—leading large-scale multinational campaigns produced across continents and managing multidisciplinary teams.

Today, Chams works across fashion, editorial, and advertising as a photographer and creative director. Because he understands the agency side from the inside out, he moves seamlessly between partnering with creative directors to realize complex briefs and developing original concepts from the ground up.
He approaches the studio with countercultural instincts, agency-level production discipline, and the hands of a mixed-media artist—regularly building physical sets, painting canvas backdrops, or introducing tactile elements like darkroom emulsions and hand embroidery.

Moving fluidly between underground subcultures and high fashion, Chams treats every project as an open dialogue, making space for complex identities, subverted conventions, and honest representation.NORTH AMERICA + EUROPE
Tanya Bettencourt
tanyabettencourt@gmail.com

MIDDLE EAST + NORTH AFRICA
Karol Akl
karol.akl@kats.media

GENERAL INQUIRIES
hello@gustavochams.com
@GUSTAVOCHAMS 2026