ZUM - revista de fotografia

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.

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.