ZUM - revista de fotografia

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and in the text hidden away in his files which are, according to the National Library of Rio de Janeiro, as yet unpublished.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?

IN JUNE THIS YEAR, the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement) called for marches in São Paulo to protest against the rise in public transport fares. The violent police repression together with the general dissatisfaction in the population drove millions of people to the streets in hundreds of the country’s towns. The protests persist until this day.

How can a biannual magazine dedicated to photography contribute to this political debate? One answer is in the most recent essay of Cia de Foto collective, published as a poster. Without the focus on the riots or police violence that inundated the media, these images shed light on group and individual participation in defense of democratic ideals. This reflection is made even more relevant because it comes from photographers who, in the beginning of the 2000’s, heated up the debate about authorship by signing images with the collective’s name, and not with their individual ones.

Politics and democracy permeate this edition. Chris Marker, who died in 2012, experiments with low resolution images taken in the Paris metro. His obsession with the female face is also an involuntary portrait of the immigrant batallions which clog the city’s arteries. No less engaged, Raymond Depardon settles his score with colour photography by reviewing his career of travels and conflicts in a text in which history blinks its eyes in every street corner. Told through archive images, Pablo Escobar’s journey of violence and oppression needs to be reckoned with if it is not to be forgotten.

Discarded Chinese photographs expose the enthusiasm and innocence which followed the opening of the country by Deng Xiaoping’s government. But can these photos really be given the status of artistic? This is what the Catalan thinker Joan Fontcuberta discusses in his article.

Experimentation and rebellion often give rise to good art. At the turn of the 1970’s, Mario Cravo Neto took the colour, volume and distortions of his sculptures to different mediums. Shown for the first time this year, the photographs were the kick off to the colourful production that would make
his best work. A few years and miles from there, Alberto García-Alix would live in black and white the colourful movida madrileña, which took over post-Franco Spain. To heat up the book fever, a powerful review discusses War Primer 2, an ambitious graphic and political intervention by the artist duo Broomberg & Chanarin in Bertolt Brecht’s war primer published in 1955.

What remains, in the end, is the advice given by Chilean Sergio Larraín to his nephew. When you see something good in a book or magazine, leave it open on the page, exhibited, for weeks, months, so long as it keeps saying something to you: “We take a long time to really see something.”

THE INDIVIDUAL, the crowd. A traditional genre in the history of photography, a portrait can offer a finely-detailed description of an individual and, at the same time, suggest the existence of a social type. Good portraits do this, and still touch on issues that concern us all. The marginalised figures from the streets of California that Katy Grannan has chosen as her subjects inhabit the boundary that divides reality from fantasy, and force us to think about standards of beauty and gender, the dictates of fashion and our Photoshop’d world. Four decades earlier, Garry Winogrand also took to the streets to make a black and white portrait of the uncertain, incendiary world of post-war America.

The other side of the planet was also experiencing turbulent times. A photojournalist for the Heilongjiang Daily during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Li Zhensheng hid thousands of negatives under the floor of his apartment. They showed the fervour of the multitudes and the arbitrary nature of Mao Zedong’s regime. Leaving behind the early revolutionary enthusiasm and becoming more aware of what was happening, Li changed, if not history, at least the memory of the 20th century.

Photography can be used as a way of dealing with oppressive realities, of becoming more attentive or simply helping us see better. This is how the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explained his field-trip to Algeria. In a rare interview, at the end of his life, Bourdieu explains how his 3,000 photographs helped him ellaborate a way of looking that lies at the heart of his sociology.

Other talented pilgrims wander the pages of this issue. The German film-maker Wim Wenders travels from Australia to the American Midwest in a diary filled with notes, friends and photographs. At ZUM’s request, Rosângela Rennó, from Minas Gerais, uses her family’s slides to reinvent her parents’ journey across the United States in 1958. Bárbara Wagner ventures into the state of Pernambuco to show a maracatu very different from the tourist guide books. André Cepeda, from Portugal, gives us a
preview of his residency in São Paulo, accompanied by a 4 x 5 inch camera.

Travel also widened the social and political dimensions of Thomas Struth’s work. In his analysis of the work of the German photographer, sociologist Richard Sennett opens up a debate on how the past, the present and the future are carved onto the faces of cities. Returning to one of the themes of this issue, Struth believes that his urban photos can be seen as portraits. If you consider them as living organisms, buildings always tell the truth. “They are the testimony of people’s character, [they] express pride,
anger, ignorance, love – everything that humans are capable of expressing.”

FEW PHOTOGRAPHERS are capable of creating a solid visual work and, at the same time, underscoring the fundamental motives that lead to the construction of images. From the clash with the 1970s American landscape, photographer and professor Stephen Shore reaches the delightful conclusion: shape or form is not an art syrup that you pour over the content; for this to make sense, it needs to come from one’s own experience.

The menu of this issue includes several photographers who have dedicated their work to photographing landscapes as a means of understanding the world. It may be constructed with scissors and sellotape on sheets of glass, as in the little known series Sobras [Leftovers] by Geraldo de Barros, completed in the last three years of his life. It can also be achieved through elaborate shots, similar to those by the Italian Luigi Ghirri. Virtually unknown in Brazil, Ghirri was both a great photographer and a writer, and combined these talents to provide an insight into some of the most prosaic issues. On his return from a trip to the São Francisco River, Caio Reisewitz brings back some monumental backland scenes.

Brought up as a photojournalist in Johannesburg, Santu Mofokeng discusses the representation of the black population and challenges the idea of social documentary. The ownership of land, economic marginalization and spirituality are just some of the political elements in his most recent work. Sent to Brasília to search through the National Archive, reporter Plinio Fraga dug up a surprising find: from the 15,000 photos recently released to the public, at least three of them prove that Brazilian children had been sent into exile and had been documented by the military dictatorship. Dorrit Harazim discusses the life of an American teacher that changed the course of history after finding two photographs: of a lynching in Indiana, Abel Meeropol wrote a song; of the orphans of a couple of spies, the poet-composer built his family.

For the past ten years, Guy Veloso has travelled throughout the country after penitents. The filmstrips show how the photographer deals with his subjects and uses them to build his narrative. A tragic melody also echoes in two other essays in the magazine. With a vast work, despite her short career, Francesca Woodman transformed her camera into her best friend. Keen to discuss the history of his country, the Lebanese-born Walid Raad constructed his fictional war works by displaying bombs that apparently had been left behind.

In 1931, August Sander spoke on the radio about the power of communication through photography. A decade later, during the war, the German photographer would be persecuted and part of his archive destroyed. As a tribute to one of the best portrait artists in the 20^th century, ZUM publishes for the first time a translation of a crucial lecture to understand Sander’s work.

PHOTOGRAPHY IS NAKED. This is what this latest issue of ZUM proclaims, as the image is stripped naked, turned inside out, looked at and debated in detail.

Known as a photographer who turned photography into a tool for political activism, Claudia Andujar is celebrated here with two rarely seen photo series. In the first, a woman assumes a metaphysical aura by using a technique of superimposing diapositives and filters. In the second, the collective subject is offset against the sky in Direita Street,  São Paulo.

To what extent what we see is independent from what we believe? In an exclusive interview, documentarist Errol Morris narrates his investigative obsession, clarifying controversies in the history of photography and journalism. Errol talks about the documentary quality of photography. What we see is not what we actually think we see. If not, let’s see.

News and blowing the whistle, technology and journalism often lead to a deadlock as presented in these two poignant essays. The author of the image on the front cover of this issue, Balazs Gardi, is a member of the Basetrack project, which uses mobile phones with apps to document a US battalion stationed in Afghanistan, providing the soldiers the chance to share information. In Ghana, South African Pieter Hugo shows the rather dark and obscure nature of the consumer world of electronics in a place where computers (such as the one I am writing with) are dispatched by the first world on their last lease on life. Also tragic and – I reluctantly admit – beautiful are these scenes of misfortune portrayed by the Mexican Enrique Metinides. With a magnificent grasp of drama, the photographer raises the bar in terms of crime reportage.

The idea that photography can be immediately understood is challenged in a number of features in this issue. German Thomas Demand puts on paper scenes from other photographs, in a game that hides and exposes the starting point. American Robert Smithson transforms his walking around the Hotel Palenque into a seminal lecture on art and architecture. Among the team of pilgrim photographers, the magazine presents the hotels photographed by João Castilho and a photo-journey made by Mauro Restiffe, at the invitation of ZUM, through the Luz neighbourhood in São Paulo, which has already dissipated the echoes of its troubled days.

Few photographers are capable of showing the real world and, at the same time, inventing a new reality. This is what William Eggleston achieved by using color photography while traveling through the South of the US. He presents here diapositives that were kept for nearly 40 years. If Eggleston’s delicate irony makes you smile, the essayist Terry Castle will make you laugh. A search for the punctum in his collection of anonymous photographs is proof that humor and perspicacity go hand in hand.

Errol Morris provides one of the most resonant phrases in this issue: “False ideas adhere to photographs like flies to flypaper”. Turn the page, help to free the flies and return them to their proper place.

PHOTOGRAPHY IS AN ACCIDENT. Not as suggested by the photo by Jeff Wall on the front cover of the magazine. But more like a fire, such as this, rifling through the files of filmmaker and photographer Jorge Bodanzky. From journalism to art, from scientific researches to social media, satellites to mobile phones, photography has taken unexpected twists and turns over time and has spread like wildfire.

ZUM is a biannual publication by the Instituto Moreira Salles dedicated to the world of photography. The magazine will bring unpublished or little known visual essays, as well as articles, interviews, and important texts on the history of photography. ZUM also provides a forum for debate on contemporary photography, which is open to everyone and anyone who believes in critical reflection on photography, and that is enriched by other fields such as cinema, literature and the visual arts. Commentaries will contribute to the better thinking on images, as presented in the table lamp of Authentication or in the chandelier of Ivan Sayers, in two photographs by Jeff Wall shown here for the first time.

With an intellectually refined universe, Jeff Wall has firmly rooted himself in the contemporary art photography scene. A counterpoint to him in this issue is the brutal reality of images of prisoners in Cambodia, scanned from the original negatives. As presented in this horrific documentation of the Cambodian genocide, photography here has to face a fundamental ethical issue.

In Brazilian paths, we see Luiz Braga’s new green forest, Miguel Rio Branco’s luminous intimacy, and swim buoys in the Piscinão de Ramos, a huge outdoor salt-water “swimming pool” in Rio de Janeiro photographed by Julio Bittencourt. Geoff Dyer talks about a series of images originally taken by Google cars that received a award on photojournalism; on the other side of the world, Japanese Kohei Yoshyiuki steps into a new kind of voyeur. Robert Frank, who withdrew from the world and from the idea of a perfect image after publishing The Americans, displays his late style in delicate polaroid photos of daily life.

Photography is also spoken words. The interview with Bernd and Hilla Becher is a frank lesson on the motivations of this couple that still gives the tone of contemporary photography. From the pages of history, Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibits his talent as a writer. In a good-natured fashion, he claimed to be responsible for providing information to a cacophonic and frenetic world, full of people who seek the company of images. Sixty years ago or so, he was already talking about us.