Part of reality To better understand this type of photograph, we should invoke the distinction between truth and righteousness drawn by the Christian philosopher St Anselm (c. 1033- 1109). According to him, the internal consistency and grammatical correctness of a verbal statement does not ensure that it is true: a coherent and well-argued proposition may […]

I. Arthur Omar visited Afghanistan in 2002 at the invitation of the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, which addressed the theme of contemporary cities. His mission was to reach the town of Bamiyan in the central region of the country and to bring back fragments of the huge statues of Buddha destroyed by the Taliban […]

For the Catalan artist JOAN FONTCUBERTA, the selfie signals a radical change in the concept of photography. Photographs by Martin Parr.   A TV COMMERCIAL for a new Samsung digital camera summed up in 60 seconds a phenomenon essay on the evolution of photography: a young woman is walking into the sea on a deserted beach. Suddenly, she […]

More than a decade ago, the Spanish artist ANTONI ABAD started Megafone.net, an internet channel for socially-discriminated groups, such as taxi drivers in Mexico City, immigrants in New York and prostitutes in Madrid. For the Brazilian version, Abad gave mobile phones with cameras to São Paulo motorbike messengers – “motoboys” – so that they could […]

Shirley cards and the racial standards that rule the visual industry.    THE MULTIPLE visual identities of Shirley, the “color balance girl,” first came to my attention in 1995 after a conversation with a buyer and seller of industrial machines in North America. He complained about a Kodak photo-processing lab that he had purchased at the […]

Filmmaker, screenplay writer and photographer, Jorge Bodanzky, who directed the classic Iracema, and will open a retrospective show at MIS-SP in June 2016, had his photographic and super-8 archives bought by Instituto Moreira Salles.  For ZUM’s website, Bodanzky interviews German photographer Michael Wesely about his series Potsdamer Platz, published on ZUM #10. Destroyed after World War II, the square in Berlin […]

The Swedish LARS TUNBJÖRK was a master of colour and irony. In this tribute, ZUM presents the Office series and invites the critic CHRISTIAN CAUJOLLE to review the work and books of the photographer.  The Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk (1956-2015) began his career with black and white photography. In the late 1970s and early 80s, […]

GRACIELA ITURBIDE’S lenses reveal a Mexico without clichés, in the slow pace of its indigenous culture, of desolate landscapes and of a unique surrealism. The grande dame of Mexican photography is in no hurry. At 73, Graciela Iturbide continues her journey through life without haste. She likes to lend from Pablo Picasso a phrase to […]

Through photography and the internet, the artist showed his own life and challenged the censorship in his country. After being forbidden to leave China for four years, Weiwei regained the right to travel around the world last July. If we reflect on the history of photography, we realize it has been widely accepted as a […]

Scenes of this São Paulo avenue taken by LUCIA MINDLIN LOEB in 2004 and 2014 show the silent crumbling of the city. Closed shops, abandoned buildings, empty pavements. It is a melancholic journey to examine the photographs of Celso Garcia Avenue, which have been patiently collected by Lucia Mindlin Loeb. It is hard to believe that one of the major […]