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.