The story of Marc Ferrez is intertwined with the history of photography in Brazil. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1843, the son of a sculptor, Ferrez was orphaned when he was seven years old and went to live in France. When he returned to Brazil, he started working at the photographic studio Casa Leuzinger, […]
Afonso Pimenta’s portraits of the inhabitants of the Aglomerado da Serra community in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, taken in the 1980s fill a gap in the recent visual history of Brazil, a period when photography was still a privilege of the few. Now 64 years old, Afonso Adriano Pimenta has done a bit of everything. […]
Imagine that the origins of photography go back to 1492. What could this mean? First and foremost, that we should unlearn the origins of photography as framed by those who were crowned its inventors and other private and state entrepreneurs, as well as its association with a technology that can be reduced to discrete devices […]
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 […]
