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 […]
Created thirty years ago, the project Vídeo nas Aldeias has instigated a small revolution in the way it has helped Brazil’s indigenous population to look at their lives and surroundings with a camera, something which historically has been the role of outsiders. The project was started by French-Brazilian Vincent Carelli and began at an NGO, […]
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 […]
