ZUM - revista de fotografia

The paintings of Éder Oliveira which open this edition were created from photographic studio portraits or extracted from the crime sections of newspapers in the state of Pará, Brazil. How is social exclusion depicted in the press and what is its face? What prejudices do we conceal in the gulf between the way we see ourselves and how we see others? When painting photographs and omitting their original medium, Oliveira shows how visual representation expresses the inequalities of our democratic representation.

Photography is context. Female icon of the Magnum agency, Susan Meiselas tells us how she traveled the world to tell stories of abuse and oppression. Be it showing us the actions of authoritarian regimes in Latin America or living alongside Cape Verdean immigrants in Lisbon, Meiselas has reenergized photojournalism, by showing us that it is necessary to engage deeply in every click. This same lesson has been left to us by the South African photographer David Goldblatt, who died this year after living his life in a divided country. His work is a testimony to and a manifesto for the battle against racism.

Divided between the roles of photographer and protester, José Inacio Parente recorded in 1968 the spark of hope that preceded the cruelest years of the dictatorship in Brazil. Then came the dark times, as Ana Vitória Mussi also suggests in her paintings of black images of sports journalism, an allusion to the period of censorship and exacerbated patriotism.

The studio portraits made in the post-war period by eccentric Mike Disfarmer, or Alec Soth’s photos taken at the turn of the century along the Mississippi River in the USA show the disappointment that surrounds the American dream at different periods.

The renowned artist Cindy Sherman tries to free herself of her own image when she embraces the illusions of social networks. With philosophical density and remarkable sensitivity, Japanese photographer Lieko Shiga plunges into the image to offer a labyrinthine report of her daily life before and after it was swallowed up by the sharp reality of a tsunami.

Photography shows the other, similar or different. On the cover of this issue, a bride re-stages her marriage in one of the thousands of images produced by Afonso Pimenta in the 1980s in Aglomerado da Serra, Belo Horizonte. At the request of his clients or on his own initiative, Pimenta documented the day-to-day lives and intimate moments of his neighbors, who had little access to photography.

Deterioration has not prevented the collection from becoming a rare and precious record of the private lives of Brazilians. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans became known in the 1990s for documenting the social and sexual lives of his friends. Disdain for tradition and hedonism fueled the aesthetic and social renewal in Germany following  the fall of the Berlin Wall. Missionary Martin Gusinde could not prevent a genocide, but his methodical study of the Tierra del Fuego people years later preserved the enchantment of those cultures. The riots following Rodney King’s death sparked the Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg’s interest in photographing the residents of the poorer suburbs of Los Angeles, with a dignity that many would rather keep invisible.

In the 1970s, artist Anna Bella Geiger assumed the identity of others to confront stereotypes and preconceptions; while more recently the contemporary Swiss artist Yann Gross records his discovery of an Amazon that combines tradition with exoticism.

Art feeds on the written word. Ninety years ago, Aleksandr Rodchenko fought the unique and authoritarian voice of painting in favor of the multiplicity of photography, in a manifesto the resounds even more strongly today if read in the light of search engines such as Google. Belgian David Claerbout explains why the dream of freedom promised by digital animation ends up reinforcing our normal senses and the dominant aesthetics.

Through memes we glimpse the future, where symbolic absurdity and subversive humor – but also prejudice and aggression – reveal more about us than we might like.

Hold it. Touch it. Browse it. Against bodily shyness and shame, the Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen shows us, in her deeply symbolic portraits of people, motherhood and the pride of being Afro-descendant. Three decades earlier, Paz Errázuriz went to the brothels of the Chilean dictatorship to protect the transsexuals who kept their dignity while living a life in the shadows. “Minorities are the majority,” she said with undeniable empathy. Freedom carved in suff ering is the topic of the article by Dorrit Harazim, who compares Dorothea Lange’s and Ansel Adams’ visions of the Second World War decree which interned Japanese-Americans purely because of their origin and appearance. At the beginning of the 20th century, the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon also used appearance to give the police a new tool – proof that photography can be used in ways not only unique but also suspicious.

In an exclusive interview, the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman talks of image as an act of creation and resistance, and reveals to be an occasional photographer. Word and images are used in the explosive synthesis by the Argentinian artist León Ferrari, who juxtaposes the Bible with Chinese, Christian and journalistic iconography. The Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira revealed the body of cities and fought against the modernist idealism that submitted the world to the vision of the artist. His radical work, shown at the Paris Biennale in 1971, vibrates with the same restlessness as that of his master William Klein, honored by Nakahira in a powerful essay. The photographer and real estate appraiser Marcos Freire is in tune with São Paulo and shows us its homes and the recent social transformations in Brazil. With a sharp critical eye, fi lmmaker Walter Carvalho exposes the issues involved in collective housing, in a mixture of disenchantment and utopia, stitched tightly together by the Pernambuco writer José Luiz Passos. The photograph is our involuntary mirror.

Since the Big Bang of the 19th century, the universe of photography has continued to expand. Cell phones have swallowed cameras, cameras have devoured video cameras, and a visual torrent has overwhelmed the feeds. In this edition, photography is dissected to expose its association with other disciplines and to map a world in dire need of research and reflection. This is what the skull on the cover suggests, an ironic flaking portrait, done by André Penteado in his research on the French Mission that arrived in Brazil in 1816. Like an archaeologist, the photographer has collected visual pieces to enrich our understanding of the puzzle that is the history of Brazil – a topic also faced with refinement by essayist Mauricio Puls when he discusses the meaning of true and false in our press photography. The Nigerian photographer J. D.’Okhai Ojeikere has united anthropology and typology in his study of hairstyles, exposing the roots of an ephemeral cultural tradition.

In addition to being beautiful photographic objects, painted photographic portraits tell the intimate story of an aspect of popular photography that still needs to be researched. The selfies of @ex_miss_febem show without constraints the self-exposure and exhibitionism of the 21st century to discuss the visual exploitation of the female body. The language of amateurism reappears in a historical text by the artist Jeff Wall on the fundamental aesthetics of art photography. The subject of a memorable retrospective, Ed van der Elsken shows a foreigner eye on his film and photography, in books and projections, while Vania Toledo looks into the nocturnal creatures of her archive. Finally, the workshops of Vídeo nas Aldeias are an original and successful example of the democratization of the image. We have gained a brave new world.

THIS ISSUE MARKS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF ZUM, a biannual publication which offers a carefully selected and wide-ranging vision of Brazilian and international visual production. As conservative winds sweep through various regions of the planet, ZUM is committed to offering its readers images on themes that are both relevant and urgent. For more than ten years, Zanele Muholi has confirmed the power of portraits in her series Faces and Phases, in which hundreds of black lesbian and transgender individuals confront violence, prejudice and social patterns. Other conflicts are discussed on the edition: in the series that Arthur Omar did for ZUM with superimposed images of his trip to Afghanistan in 2002, shortly after it was invaded by the United States; in the political work of the German artist Gerhard Richter, concerned with the clash between photography and painting; in the ethnic cleansing in Ecuador a hundred years ago, suggested by the images of Ecuadorian José Domingo Laso; and in the shocking collages of Thomas Hirschhorn, constructed from scenes of explicit violence which, according to the artist, are intended to shake the spectator from lethargy.

Social issues are also central to the work of the collective Trëma, which won the ZUM/IMS Photography Grant in 2015. Trëma travelled to Congo and to Colombia to photograph the memories of two immigrants who arrived in Brazil last year, using the accounts given here as the basis for the pictures. To ensure an atmosphere of celebration, ZUM pays homage to the brilliant Fernando Lemos, who looks back on his career and discusses the principles of his artistic practice by means of the photographs he took in Portugal between 1945 and 1952, some of them hitherto unpublished. In a penetrating analysis of the selfie, the Catalan Joan Fontcuberta shows how photography is ceasing to be a means of preserving memory, to become instead a means of communication. This issue opens with eight historical xerographic narratives from Mario Ramiro. The artist and professor features again in the magazine, with a fragment of his doctoral thesis, which examines the spirit photography produced in Brazil and explores the relationship between photography and truth, science and religion. When we talk about images, not everything is what it seems.

TO CELEBRATE its tenth edition, ZUM presents both new and historical photo essays, in addition to texts written especially for the magazine. In an outstanding example of historical review, Professor Andreas Valentin revisits the work of José Oiticica Filho, who joined his scientific and artistic knowledge to challenge the experiment between reality and photography. Tatewaki Nio, author of the cover photo of this edition, crossed the border with Brazil to photograph Bolivia’s amazing new architecture, with buildings that at times resemble jukeboxes created with Photoshop. Three features make a powerful contribution to our reflections on the circulation of the image. In two different series, Odires Mlászho scratches the reverse side of photographs published in newspapers and transforms pictures from books into serpentine, in an obsessive search to understand how images are modified when their form, context and ink are extracted from them. Dorrit Harazim, a frequent contributor to ZUM, reviews David Shields’ polemical book, which challenges the impartiality of visual coverage of war by The New York Times – a careful reflection, which deserved to be extended to the Brazilian press.

The Canadian professor Lorna Roth questions the neutrality of photographic technology in bringing to light the history of Shirley cards, used since the 1940s to standardise the skin tones in photos. The article on Motoboy Channel, a kind of image-based social network replicated in several places round the world, discusses how digital tools can strengthen the identity of a group. This edition of ZUM also includes Nicholas Nixon’s complete series of portraits that reflect on the passage of time in the lives of four women; the condensed time in Michael Wesely’s images of the rebuilding of the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin; the incendiary production of Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov, who exposed the social and political conflicts in his country; and the uncanny, technicolour humour of Swede Lars Tunbjörk, who died in 2015 at the peak of his career. Enjoy the issue.

ON THE 20th anniversary of the death of George Love, the American photographer who lived in Brazil between 1960 and 1980, ZUM publishes some of his portraits and landscapes, which contrast the frenetic stress of cities with paradisiac, apocalyptic visions. In a less exalted vein, Graciela Iturbide, the grande dame of Mexican photography, shows us women who appear to be monuments carved out of stone. In a revealing interview, Lucien Hervé, who died in 2007, recalls his career and reminds us that good photography is built up from bricks of ideas. Lucia Mindlin Loeb’s fascination with cities is a constant thread running through her photographic survey. Her uninhabited streets, photographed ten years apart, are a perfect counterpoint to the gregarious life of the Araweté people, informally photographed in the 1980s by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

In these days of bits and bytes, ZUM looks back at the historical photographic experiments conceived by the Italian Ugo Mulas to show how the supposed impartiality of the image can serve the most ambiguous purposes. From Mulas to Saul Bellow, distrust dominates this edition – the feeling is also shared by Professor David Levi Strauss, who analyzes the political meaning of some famous cases of photographic manipulation. Political boldness is part and parcel of the images shot by Ai Weiwei’s visual machine gun, who took aim at the Chinese government and hit the mark in our remarkable world of images.

FEW ARTISTIC MEDIUMS are as diverse as photography. And diversity is not lacking in this edition of ZUM. From a reign of gentleness comes Rinko Kawauchi, with photographic pearls that add to the aesthetic sensibility that marks Japanese photography. Challenging the limits of an image, artist Regina Silveira constructs three-dimensional spaces in two distinct series and shows how her recent work is founded upon a previous photographic practice, with her collections of postcards – two series of which are reproduced here on their natural scale – and her Enigmas series, which combines the photo of an object and a shadow printed as a photogram. Both Rinko and Regina publish their work and produce books, an increasing wave in contemporary art. Gerry Badger guides us through this flood of production, revisiting the books he considers most important to the history of photography.

Dorrit Harazim tells the story of photographer Lee Miller, her fascinating work and intrepid life. American Nan Goldin is no less courageous as she discuss censorship and shows how her work is a perfect expression of her life. Highly popular with the general public but less so with critics, the new adventures of Sebastião Salgado are analysed from different perspectives. ZUM pays a posthumous tribute to Lewis Baltz and A. C. D’Ávila, who both made valuable contributions to the art in the 20th century. And while the infamous 7 – 1 soccer score becomes a symbol of the difficult times Brazil is passing through, Eustáquio Neves teaches us to question art and whatever else offers a crystal clear vision.

THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY has many gaps. For every well-known photographer, there are many others to be discovered and acknowledged. This is the case with Assis Horta, dug up from the photographic mines in the city of Diamantina. The perfection in his work, his vast production and the fact that his photos have been preserved for decades make sure this 96-year-old from Minas Gerais state holds a position of honour in the Brazilian photography and social history encyclopaedias.

In the last 100 years, war photography has questioned image manipulation, helping define criteria that are, to this day, subject to heated debate. In an article commissioned for the centenary of the First World War, the historian Hilary Roberts shows how the idea of photographic truth was shaped during the conflict, in the discussion of the ethical principles of journalism, technical advances and the demands of those who risked their lives on the front lines.

In the last edition of ZUM, Fred Ritchin, photography professor at the University of New York, criticized the traditional view of photojournalism and encouraged photographers and editors to venture into new paths. The Offside project, organized by the Magnum Agency during Brazilian World Cup, is a first step. In June and July this year, while spectators and journalists had their eyes on the pitch, eight photographers and two collectives got together to tell a story parallel to the event. From urban haikus to daily theatricality, passing by social and religious types, the photographers defined their work agenda and wandered the country to produce the special material seen in this edition.

Very few photographers have embraced the “on the road” spirit as much as the Japanese master Daido Moriyama. Known for his unorthodox techniques, such as shooting without looking through the viewfinder or editing books using photocopiers, Daido compares the adventure of hitting the road to the experience of reading dozens of books, in one of the most beautiful reflections of his career.

For almost 30 years, the philosopher Vilém Flusser suggested that electromagnetic photography would be the cutting edge trigger of a cultural revolution. Free from its material support, the image would circulate and allow democracy to spread its wings. Utopic and premonitory, Flusser did not imagine the course our digital life would take, but defended a critical analysis of images as a precious tool to understand what goes on around us. Not only is this the vision that defines ZUM but it is also the backbone of Mauricio Lissovsky’s essay, where he discusses how the cover photo of a book can reflect a social transformation of dramatic and profound consequences.

ART CRITICS AND ARTISTS have been discussing what is unique about photography’s artistry since it was invented. In 1976 Alair Gomes, prolific photographer and compulsive writer, decided to contribute with the debate, unravelling his arguments in “Critical and candid reflections on photography.” After nearly 40 years, the rigour and originality of his thinking are still influential. Photography’s trump card, Alair says, is the medium’s ability to work with a large number of images – and so create narrative sequences. It is this reasoning that illuminates his work, as can be seen in the photographs and in the text hidden away in his files which are, according to the National Library of Rio de Janeiro, as yet unpublished.

Narrative cohesion and critical reflection on photographic language have always been of interest to ZUM. At the invitation of the magazine, the Indian photographer Dayanita Singh retraces her career in an essay that weaves together text and image, fact and fiction. Rubens Mano’s new work presents a collection of 60 stills taken from his videos of Brasília – his unblinking view of the city balances concrete and improvisation, ruin and construction. Raul Garcez’s affectionate and equally melancholic gaze roams over the first public housing development in São Paulo, constructed in the 1950s.

An antidote to these times of irrelevant selfies, vibrant portraits fill the pages of this edition. In a humorous and confessional piece, Richard Avedon challenges the naturalness of the pose by declaring the artificialness of his family albums and his admiration for the drawings of Egon Schiele. Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra may have heard Avedon’s advice: with a painter’s eye, she contemplates the discomfort of children and young people invited to pose – sometimes for long periods – in the lush greenery of parkland. Soon to turn 80, Malick Sidibé has immortalized Mali society’s enthusiasm for fashion and popular culture fads during the post-independence period.

Photography slowly reveals its political sensibilities. While David Perlov reflects on the private and the public in his films, Antonio Manuel’s interventions on newspaper articles and photographs strengthen his artistic voice. Re-affirming his position as one of the most important thinkers on photojournalism, Fred Ritchin discusses the future of the profession and the inadequacy of the term “digital photography” when we are to describe what comes next. Ritchin’s thoughts on this are well illustrated by the press collective Mídia Ninja in their coverage of some of the most immediate issues that have affected Brazil and the world. Is there a pixel at the end of the tunnel? Or is it that, as Alair used to provoke, photography has yet to become fully conscious of itself?