ZUM - revista de fotografia

Covered with palm oil, mercuro-chrome, ceremonial powder, mud or annatto, bodies pulsate in all the pages of ZUM. In the self-portraits of María Magdalena Campos-Pons, the body is the sea that embraces the Afro-diasporic identity of Black Latin American women, while in the offerings of Ayrson Heráclito, the body embodies the spirituality of the tropics, conceived between Yoruba cosmologies and the rituals of Bahian candomblé.

The photos of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie are evidence of lovers’ bodies, images such as the writer’s cancer tests, which reduced the disease to visible symptoms. In the work of the painter Luiz Zerbini, the photographic body dissolves in the research process until it appears again, reincarnated in pigments of color and light.

The negatives of Milagros de la Torre hide bodies which would be revealed by box camera street photographers, in an operation that points out to the much-desired social distinction and recalls the racial erasure they suffered.

In the photographs of Rosa Gauditano, women affirm their autonomy through bodies that vibrate with pleasure and freedom. In Zahy Tentehar’s films, her body is the geography that reconstructs the expropriated identity of the original peoples. Freedom and memory also meet in the performances of the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld, who challenged the spaces of power and repression with her body in the midst of the military dictatorship. For Congolese artist Sammy Baloji, the photographic album is not an affirmation of subjectivity, but the restoration of bodies that fell in the collective resistance.

Thyago Nogueira, Rony Maltz and Elisa von Randow

Cover and back cover: Freedom Trap 3 and 1 (2013), by María Magdalena Campos-Pons.

A question permeates many of the works in this edition. How to face the violence inscribed in the history of photography and deeply rooted in the archives of images? With different strategies, the artists presente here look into ethnographic production, family albums, journalistic projects and even travel photographs to repossess the images, restore their stories and celebrate life.

At the opening of this edition, Paulo Nazareth’s photographs are transformed into postcards “in reverse” as they return news of a history of racism and xenophobia to the United States. Nazareth also fights the death evoked by the historical archives of black people by animating photographic reproductions with the breath of the white spots of helmeted guineafowls. Gê Viana recovers the history of the quilombolas of Alcântara by throwing light on an important set of photographs with layers of color and life; while the Mexican artist Diego Moreno uses his family snaps to reveal the creatures that inhabit the depths of the human soul.

Racial and erotic tensions overlap in Lyle Ashton Harris’s Blow Ups, which combine world news with the intimacy of the artist. Made over many years, his blow-ups have been combined for ZUM to form a single narrative. In this edition’s interview, Sophie Calle reveals how she writes her biography by projecting herself into the life of others with grains of fine irony.

Facing the visual ocean is also a way to reestablish history and redefine self-identity. Featured on the cover of this edition, artist Igi Lólá Ayedun uses self-portraits and artificial intelligence to construct a future of beings who navigate an ancestral universe. Between the ready-made and the assemblage, the costumes worn by the papangus photographed by Nicolas Gondim make the future a sampled present. The crises of the present echo the melancholy of the past, as seen in Adriana Lestido’s distant Buenos Aires, and in the economic crisis facing contemporary Argentina. In a dialog created for this edition, writer David Campany and artist Penelope Umbrico advance and retreat into a time machine to show that the reproducibility of photography, since its inception in the 19th century, remains radically subversive and current. The future sleeps in the past.

Thyago Nogueira, editor

THE 21ST CENTURY has buried the idea of a unique and shared reality. What could be universal when some talk for others, offering their views as a corollary of their privileges? In the field of art, fragmentation has invaded the frame, helping us to reverse the perspective. Original artists invest in collages and reorganize archives to suture gaps and compose new realities.

The cover and opening article in this edition, Val Souza refreshes feminism by nourishing it with images of black women. In her self-portraits, Souza confronts the look that objectifies, as well as defies the narrow patterns of beauty. Her quest to redefine Venus gave rise to a trans-historic panel celebrating the deity of independent and resilient women. In the 1970s, Gretta Sarfaty also broke patterns by ironizing her own image. Iconoclastic, Justine Kurland has cut open the photographic canon to protest against the ruling patriarchy. Survivors of the Argentinian dictatorship, women – and photographs – of the Trans Memory Archive rewrite history and bear witness to a life that resists oppression and prejudice. In the performances of the Amazon entity Uýra, resistance is also a way of learning with nature.

Throughout its history, photography has experimented with different ways of looking at the other. In a moving homage to filmmaker Andrea Tonacci, researcher Patricia Mourão de Andrade looks back at the originality, hesitations and impasses of a film art committed to the struggles of others. Lourdes Grobet, who died earlier this year, glorified wrestling by celebrating the sportsmen who give form to Mexican popular culture. The photographs of filmmaker Affonso Uchôa and artist Desali exhibit their own reality “without sentimentality, without self-pity or false exercises of empathy”, in the words of Cidinha da Silva. “They are expressions of the outskirts of Brazil through their own voice”, continues the writer from Minas Gerais, also echoing Maxwell Alexandre’s new work, which removes blacks from paintings to display them in the galleries, where they choose what to see and why. Changing times!

Thyago Nogueira, editor

The war in Ukraine has rekindled the importance of images in international mobilization, but the album of photographs of human tragedies has been growing for years without all human suffering being visible.

Samuel Fosso has made the self-portrait a lifeline to overcome the violence and injustices that have marked the history of the Central African Republic. In the 1970s, he fulfilled his desires with photography; today, he uses his images to navigate between continuing pleasure and suffering. In the China of the 1990s, Rong Rong and his troupe of artists found in performance
a way to resist the social oppression that the drive for economic growth insisted on keeping invisible.

On the other side of the world, Brazilian photographer Lázaro Roberto has recorded the beauty and struggle of his people in an educational and affirmative mission. His work gave rise to the Zumví Afro Photography
Archive, one of the most important independent collections in the country.

In his collages and writings, Arthur Jafa has also rewritten history, seeking justice by denouncing the concealment by European modernism of African roots and making evident the contribution of Black art to world culture.

Using mutilated newspapers to highlight their photographic coverage, Mabe Bethônico eloquently shows us the crimes of Mariana and Brumadinho and the perverse association between industry and journalism. Who has the right to build a future, asks art historian
T. J. Demos. In order to combat the racial violence of capitalism, one must listen to Black, transsexual and indigenous art.

In the informality of Fernanda Liberti’s photographs, a silent, libertarian rebellion stitches alliances between distinct identities. Her visual album is included as a poster for ZUM subscribers.

In her photographs and writings, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro teaches us that her transmutation is not only a form of healing, but a revolutionary opportunity for images, languages and ourselves to find new ways of being and existing.

ZUM emerged in 2011 to promote contemporary photography and debate on its burning issues. Over the last ten years, around 400 collaborators have taken turns to reduce our visual ignorance. Alfredo Jaar, interviewed in this edition, reminds us that photographs bear a way of seeing the world which is not always visual. Deciphering them continues to be the mission of this magazine. To celebrate ZUM’s 10th anniversary, we are offering our readers a poster with another of Jaar’s maxims: “You do not take a photograph. You make a photograph.”

In the 1950s, photographer Gordon Parks exposed Alabama’s deep-rooted racism by the simple expedient of following the daily lives of a Black family. The story of the Causeys, told in bright and pungent colors, was also his. It was also that of George Floyd, whose murder at the hands of the American police force in 2020 was captured on video and sparked the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement through the world. And that of Deborah Willis, who uses photography as a means to weave together her family’s journey to the fight for respect and justice through the generations.

Without leaving the creative force to one side, the artists Poulomi Basu, Laia Abril and Frida Orupabo also use photography as a weapon to make reports. Basu confronts the cruelty of the ethnic and political conflict that fragments society in central India. With forensic detail, April dissects the historical culture of machismo that destroys lives all over the world. By unveiling colonial archives, Orupabo gives form to its traumas and obliges us to face its fruits. Recent attacks on monuments are founded on the certainty that those who control the images, control politics, as researcher Laura Erber points out when analyzing various acts of iconoclasm. But it is Glicéria Tupinambá  who commands the retaliation against colonialism by bringing the extinct cloaks of her people back to life, guided by dreams, visions and photographs. Rafael Pavarotti, whose rise to fame is stunning and meteoric, populates the world of international fashion with his army of martyrs, warriors and orix s willing to face the apocalypse. From the peaceful Icoaraci in Belém, Pará , the photographer redefined beauty and showed that peace is an ongoing struggle. Let us all take up the fight.

Reaching the twentieth printed edition is quite a feat, even when there’s little to celebrate. In this ZUM#20 we bring together contributors who defy the status quo of the image and make us see what we have not seen – be it by transforming the personal universe through the mirror of collective tragedies, by tackling with irony the situation of those at the edges of capitalism, or by facing the archives on which history is based, but which can also be used to rewrite history. Like many Brazilians, the young photographer Allan Weber lost his job during the pandemic. To support his family, he put down a deposit on a motorcycle and started to work delivering orders made via cellphone apps, from his home in the north of Rio de Janeiro. The scenes of his everyday life are on the cover of this edition, revealing the beauty of an urgent and often invisible routine. It is like opening an intimate diary that Carrie Mae Weems invites us to her kitchen table, to share her anxieties. Published in full here, in times of isolation, the series of photographs completes thirty years and is ever-more current. With a touch of irresistible prose, Lita Cerqueira clicks open the shutter of the memories and loves that have marked her life. In a stroll through the night, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk ventures into photography to scrutinize the urban landscape of Istanbul, a city in transformation.

Photography and literature still fuse in a new tale by the writer Ana Paula Maia, inspired by the images taken for ToiletPaper, a magazine edited by the artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. Visual transgression and delirium are also the pillars sustaining the work of the trans collectives Limitrofe Television, Analcancer2009 and Bouquet International. Their pop calendar, which opens this edition (transformed into a poster for subscribers) helps us to count the time we have lost. Faced with so many images, what is the role of archives? In rescuing the stories behind old snaps, the Paiter Suru. people prepare the arrows of the future. Denilson Baniwa confronts the classic iconography of Theodor Koch-Grünberg with the icons of the movies, and so rocks the frontier which divides our photographic science and pure science fiction. Facing tradition itself, the architect Paulo Tavares contests the notion of progress which permeates modern Brazilian photography and shows how it can help combat the erasure of the indigenous peoples it helped to celebrate. We carry on vigilant in difficult times.

To investigate the past is to give a future to the present. Artist Rosana Paulino opens this edition with a new work (in poster form for subscribers to ZUM), in which she investigates the violent roots of Brazil’s history – our true nature, which art and society insist on hiding. Ever more visible, the indigenous artists selected by curator Naine Terena break down frontiers to rewrite the history of Brazilian art from new perspectives. Both the nudes by the Chinese photographer Ren Hang and the photographic archives rescued by artist Carmen Winant suggest that the body can be a free territory, open to self-exploration. Freedom also laps at the work of Davi de Jesus do Nascimento, who uses self-portraits and his family’s collection of photographs to build his identity and ancestry.

In an extreme opposite, the faces and bodies of Ana Mendieta’s performances and the posters photographed by Teresa Margolles compel us to remind that violence against women is not just a statistic. Our body moves into the 21st century under the surveillance of images, as Julian Stallabrass’ essay on art and politics shows, or in the portraits of immigrants in search of a future, taken by artist Richard Mosse. Researchers Kênia Freitas and José Messias fully examine Beyoncé’s Afrofuturist epic to celebrate the creative potential and investigate its narrative ambiguity.

Every step we take into the future brings us closer to the past. After all, what is photography and what is it for? In their own time and in their own way, Man Ray and Roland Barthes sought an answer; in texts which have become classics they found more questions and the certainty of a varied and irreducible essence.

The world has come to a halt. And, through the lens of a virus, it has found itself to be even more unequal. Social exclusion, racism and lies have become worse. In the images that follow, the body asserts itself as a battleground and a place of resistance: be it in the performances of Berna Reale, which uncover the violence of the State; or in the clips of Hudinilson Jr., which expose the desires that we insist on repressing; or in the proud gazes portrayed by Deana Lawson, which, according to the writer Zadie Smith, are a response to the discrimination promoted by the history of men and of the image.

The political struggle also takes hold in the visual field. And we need history to face the dispute: as the artist Ahlam Shibli reveals in showing the attempt to erase the Palestinian tragedy, or through professors Eyal and Ines Weizman, by investigating tragedies visible only in the gaps between the images. The verb “to go viral” has returned to the center stage, confusing even more the boundaries between truth and falsehood, as Giselle Beiguelman explains in analyzing the spread of videos produced by artificial intelligence – the deepfakes.

In the post-war photo collages of Décio Pignatari, in the scenes of the Indian coast of Sohrab Hura, or in Lebohang Kganye’s reinvention of the family album, the surreal helps us cope with the violence and to rebuild ties. With a game of chance, artist Paulo Bruscky has created a new work, printed in fluorescent colors. This work also circulates as a special insert in the printed magazine for subscribers, reaffirming our commitment to the printed image, the physical presence.

Restrictions to free movement, established to protect us, mean that this edition is arriving late, but it is no less dashing. On the eve of it going to press, Ventura Profana presented us with some dazzling photomontages, which join symbols of the Abrahamic religions with those of the political and social situation in Brazil and in the rest of the world. The images have made it to the cover and the supplement that opens this special edition. We are all under attack, physical or virtual, but bodies and images resist.

In the beginning, everything was blue, as can be seen in the cyanotypes made by Anna Atkins, whose primacy in the history of the photobook has only been recognized almost two centuries later. In his last major work, Michael Schmidt shows the pernicious consequences of capitalism in stomach-turning photos.

Photography has never been a neutral technology, recalls the writer Ariella Azoulay in dispelling the myths of imperial origins to build other histories of photography. So does the anthropologist Hélio Menezes, who identifies the participation of the slave system in the modern progress documented by Marc Ferrez in the 19th century.

From frame to frame, the cinephile Eduardo Solon amassed a collection of moments in which his affective memory is intertwined with the history of cinema. A pioneer, Dora Maar has also reinvented the world from fragments,
with her surrealist photomontages.

The historians Mauricio Lissovsky and Ana Maria Mauad recover photos which show that torture was a routine practice in Brazil during the military dictatorship. In an exclusive interview, Don McCullin reveals that he does not feel proud of his war photographs, and advises young people to register the reality of their own cities. That’s what the Chinese photographer Feng Li does, prompted by the visual Babel of contemporary China.

Here in Brazil, the failure of public policies carves the emptiness captured by Vincent Catala in the faces and landscapes of Rio de Janeiro. Progress is also an illusion in the photographic series by Carlos Zílio, current both during the dark years of the military dictatorship and in our present.

In a time of uncertainty regarding the future, to relearn how to look is fundamental to recover the capacity to imagine the new, together.

For decades photography has been carving out different clichês for itself. We need to be aware of them to dismiss them. Artist Hito Steyerl contrasts the images of perfect people that appear in spam messages to the growing number of politically invisible or discriminated citizens. Photographer Camila Falcão presents the intimacy of transsexual and transvestite people, who have built a new type of feminism while their lives and rights are under threat.

Be wary of what you see and what others have seen on your behalf. For every photograph taken by Walker Evans and other top photographers, recording the efforts of the United States government to overcome the Great Depression, thousands of others were discarded and are only now being seen. Similarly, behind every hero from the Vietnam War, there are hidden Vietcong photographers who worked for their own cause and obstinately sought victory.

South African Guy Tillim presents us with the historical and urban layers of contemporary Africa, where the colonizers were replaced by dictators, and are now opening up to global capitalism. The product of positivist criminology, an archive of penitentiary tattoos gives us a snapshot of the stories of the American, Italian, Syrian and other immigrants who crossed ways in São Paulo in the early 20th century.

While the Portuguese artist Jorge Molder investigates the effects of chance, the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto reflects on the human desire to fix time.

We look with fresh eyes at the masterly work of Manuel .lvarez Bravo, setting aside the exoticism that the Eurocentric view imposed on the artists of his country – a tension between modernism and nationalism, which is also present in the hitherto unpublished portrait of Oscar Niemeyer by Irving Penn.

It is important to keep one’s eyes open to see better and more freely.