The passport-style photographs of Tipo Passe show models wearing nondescript, contemporary clothes and traditional African masks.
He began taking photos with his grandmother's compact camera and photography became a means for Chagas to understand himself, communicate, and stimulate thoughts about memories.
[5] Scholar Ana Balona de Oliveira wrote that the lonely objects in the series are also biographical, showing the estrangement of being a diasporic immigrant among the anonymous commuters of London and Newport, and the lost familiarity of returning to the postwar changes in Luanda.
[7] Chagas exhibited photographs from Found Not Taken[8] to represent Angola at the country's first Venice Biennale national pavilion in 2013, curated by Paula Nascimento and Stephano Rabolli Pansera.
His exhibition placed on the floor poster-sized photographs of discarded objects positioned in relation to weathered architecture in the Angolan capital, Luanda.
[9] These giveaway poster stacks were in "stark juxtaposition" with the opulent, Catholic decorations of the host, Palazzo Cini,[9] which had been closed for the previous two decades.
[9] The curators had asked Chagas to display only the photographs from Luanda for the Biennale, which he found acceptable since it didn't take the series out of context.
[14] Tipo Passe (2012–2014[4]) is a large-scale portrait photograph series depicting models dressed in nondescript, contemporary attire contrasting with traditional African masks.