Fernanda, Over the last few weeks, I have spent a lot of time looking at your photos and collages, trying to find the right tone and the form to write and organize my impressions of your work. After a few tries that I wasn’t happy about, I thought that the simplicity of a letter would […]
A black man who records his peers with a camera is a conquest. The under representation of Brazilian Black art in collections, museums, galleries, festivals, exhibitions, publications, and curatorial projects is evidence that the work of white Brazilians continues to dominate the visual arts. If this Black guy is the son of a laundress and […]
“I find it difficult to look at these photo- graphs without flinching from the memories and from the anger they invoke. But I must look. I must remember, as you must. For this was history in the making. Like it or not, you cannot hide from the camera’s eye.” MYRLIE EVERS-WILLIAMS, foreword to The Civil […]
The story of the Tupinambá cloak is marked by images. I see our culture as a pot thrown to the ground, the pieces scattered all over the place. Now we have to reassemble it as if it were a jigsaw puzzle. The memory of the cloak is in our songs. Through them, we have succeeded […]
It is not uncommom for photographs to take on a life of their own, becoming better known than the photographer who took them. This is a recurrent theme in Lita Cerqueira’s work. There is a deep sense of familiarity surrounding many of the images she has taken over the last forty years, stemming from both […]
Since the past two decades Ahlam Shibli’s photographic work has become one of the sharpest and most insightful of the contemporary art field. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Born in 1970, in Palestine, Ahlam Shibli has produced many different series of photographs whose main concern is the […]
In the second half of the 19th century, photographic studies of Imperial Brazil left us with images which allow us to get to know the faces of children, men, and women who lived under the yoke of slavery. The photographic records of humans of African descent taken at that time have been investigated by a […]
You are welcome to come home to yourself. Let Black be synonymous with glory. The visual album Black Is King by the American singer Beyoncé Knowles-Carter consists of a sequence of video clips from her album The Lion King: The Gift, created as the soundtrack to the new version of the film The Lion King […]
Imagine a goddess. Envision a queen. Her skin is dark, her hair is black. Anointed with Jergens lotion, she possesses a spectacular beauty. Around her lovely wrist winds a simple silver band, like two rivers meeting at a delta. Her curves are ideal, her eyes narrowed and severe; the fingers of her right hand signal […]
Arno Gisinger: From the end of the 19th century, the great art historians, such as Heinrich Wölfflin, considered it normal to include photography in their research and teaching practices. But, above all, it is Aby Warburg’s famous Mnemosyne Atlas which places photography in the center of a new way of thinking, a new methodology used […]
