Fernando, your best known photos were taken when you were between 23 and 26 years old and lived in Lisbon, under António de Oliveira Salazar’s New State (1933-74). How did your artistic career start? I was drawn to the world of art by chance, or better, by some circumstances of life. I learned to read […]
Image spam created by Giselle Beiguelman Dense clusters of radio waves leave our planet every second. Our letters and snapshots, intimate and official communications, TV broadcasts and text messages drift away from earth in rings, a tectonic architecture of the desires and fears of our times [1]. In a few hundred thousand years, extraterrestrial forms […]
When thinking of American documentary photography of the 1930s, images such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) or Walker Evans’s portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs titled Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (1936) immediately come to mind. Symbols of the migrant workers’ struggle during the Great Depression in America, the two works represent a crucial moment for […]
The dark-eyed young man seems exhausted. “Caboclo”, of mixed native Brazilian and white descent, he has the toughened look and posture of a fragile body. These subjects, anonymous and of a similar physical type, are seen by society as outcasts and are the protagonists of the paintings of Éder Oliveira. Born in Timboteua, a town […]
In the early 2000s, David Goldblatt (1930-2018) was at home with his wife when a gang of criminals burst in. The hours of terror only ended when the invaders left. Despite the personal consequences of the traumatic event, for the great chronicler of South African apartheid this was the starting point of a new photographic […]
The interweaving of video and photography in performance art in the 1970s contributed to the debate on identity, gender and the body, and brought to the fore works by female artists. In 1974, American theorist Rosalind Krauss proposed the psychoanalytical hypothesis that the speculative potential of video also includes the possibility of autoerotic exploitation. In […]
A traveller who hated travelling, Claude Lévi-Strauss begins Tristes tropiques (1955) by ironizing the importance that is usually given to banal passages in explorers’ stories. He follows this with acidic comments about the heat of boats, children and beetroots. The tuber is used as a metaphor to represent the massification of 20th century civilizations. “Mankind […]
The conventional wisdom regarding the relationship of the photographic image to politics is that the image is not the politics, but that its status as a political “object” is determined by other factors: modes of circulation, the visual networks into which it is inserted, and the thing or person or event it documents. This is […]
Coral dresses herself, item by item, in the corridor of the La Carlina brothel in Santiago, Chile, apparently unconcerned with who is watching her. The sequence of images shows a meticulous, assertive diva. All she had to do was to rest her left hand on her hip while standing at the brothel door for the […]
The girl is sitting on the dirt floor, in the shade of a tree. Her hair is braided and she is wearing a colorful blouse and skirt. With her back to the camera, her pose has little of spontaneity about it. It seems that she has been told how to pose. Her face is not […]
