{"id":47001,"date":"2021-08-03T16:44:05","date_gmt":"2021-08-03T19:44:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistazum.com.br\/uncategorized\/o-meu-povo\/"},"modified":"2022-06-02T16:31:28","modified_gmt":"2022-06-02T19:31:28","slug":"o-meu-povo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistazum.com.br\/en\/revista-zum-20-2\/o-meu-povo\/","title":{"rendered":"My people"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jovem marceneiro de Cachoeira<\/em>, Bahia, 1999<\/p><\/div>\n

It is not uncommom for photographs to take on a life of their own, becoming better known than the photographer who took them. This is a recurrent theme in Lita Cerqueira\u2019s work. There is a deep sense of familiarity surrounding many of the images she has taken over the last forty years, stemming from both the capillarity of her work, which can be found in exhibitions, books, and postcards, and in the affection with which she treats her models and themes.<\/p>\n

Born in Salvador in 1952, the seventh daughter of a poor family, Joselita Almeida Cerqueira discovered photography for herself, recording what was around her. She photographed the kids who hung out with her young son, and their parents became her first clients. She photographed artists \u2013 above all musicians such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Cazuza, and Ney Matogrosso \u2013 with whom she had a close relationship in Salvador in the 1970s. She also documented the traditional festivals, habits, and customs of the people of Bahia, as can be seen in the image of a young carpenter with a mask on his head.<\/p>\n

She started as an actress in the theater. She then went on to movie cinematography, and was able to reinvent herself when it was necessary, for example, when she produced postcards of landscape images of Brazil. Cerqueira\u2019s transition to digital photography was not without a certain trauma as, whenever possible, she tried to remain faithful to black and white and to analog photography. Using her camera as a means of both subsistence and artistic expression, she has accumulated one of the richest and most eclectic photographic collections of the last decades of the 20th century and the start of this century, as well as a fascinating collection of observations, stories and memories.<\/p>\n

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Carla na ladeira do Carmo, diante da escadaria da igreja do Pa\u00e7o<\/em>, Salvador, Bahia, 1975<\/p><\/div>\n

How did it all start?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had always been a bit of an artist in our family. I am the daughter of a mother who had eleven children. She raised us very well, looked after us, cooked. She taught both the boys and the girls to carry out domestic tasks \u2013 and to study. Because she had been brought up on a farm, poor thing, where only the boys studied. She moved to Salvador and married my father, who was also the son of a farmer. They had eleven children and raised them well. Life was not easy, but they raised them well. We lived in the historic center of the city, where Anselmo Duarte\u2019s movie The Given Word<\/em> (O pagador de promessas<\/em>) was filmed. I would stay by the window. I started to take photographs because a friend gave me a camera, saying I had the style for that. I started photographing the roofs in the street I could see from the first floor of our house.<\/p>\n

I was a kind of the family\u2019s black sheep, because I went to live on my own, worked in a theater in Bahia from the age of seventeen, also worked in the press, and sold advertising for a newspaper called O Verbo<\/em>. I hung out with the people in the Bahian art scene, studying theater. I lived for a while in Arembepe. That\u2019s where it all started, I met everyone. I\u2019m still friendly with the people that lived in that house. I did spend a few months in S\u00e3o Paulo, but I thought it was cold and ended up coming back to Bahia.<\/p>\n

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O pintor Reginaldo Bonfim<\/em>, Salvador, Bahia, 1994<\/p><\/div>\n

It was a very effervescent time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know anything about anything, to tell you the truth. I came from a Catholic family, we weren\u2019t involved in politics. After I got pregnant, I returned to S\u00e3o Paulo and finally came to Rio, where my son Pedro was born in 1972. I\u2019ve been living in this city for almost fifty years. I\u2019ve been a professional photographer since my son turned two. I started to photograph him. I had already taken pictures of some roofs, had been a photographer\u2019s assistant, and then I took some photos of Pedro crawling in the Nossa Senhora da Paz square. There were some kids from upper class families there \u2013 attractive, well-dressed \u2013 and I photographed them. One day I showed my photos to a nanny, who showed them to her employer, and he wanted to purchase them. I found that I could make a little money from this work. I returned to Bahia for a while and a friend with a studio called Lambe-Lambe<\/em> [a street box camera] asked me to work with him. I wasn\u2019t doing anything in Bahia, and had my son with me. I took photos for documents and photographed weddings, and he started asking me to help him photograph the traditional festivals. I started photographing people, ordinary people, which was what I liked doing. I started to struggle to get money, to survive. I had a very strong connection to photography, because when I came to my senses, I had a six-month old infant to care for and no help from the father. My parents hadn\u2019t left me anything, I was uncultured, untrained. I knew how to act, but you have to train to be an actress, you have to wait for the parts to come, you have to study. There was no way I could do that.<\/p>\n

When it comes to being self-taught, it seems that you absorb the sensibility of this photographic language intuitively, even though you did not learn it formally. Do you learn by looking?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had no idea what it was to cut a photo afterwards. That is for the people in the developing lab. As I sent them to other people to develop, I learned to improve. It was Neville d\u2019Almeida who gave me a brilliant tip, when I was taking stills for a movie of his, calling my attention to things which were in the photo and that I hadn\u2019t seen. I learned through these little details. Even now, I don\u2019t really know how to take photographs. I photograph because I love it.<\/p>\n

I learned through my mistakes. Once I photographed someone who had a disability, a physical disability, and I felt really sorry, because her eyes were pleading with me not to take the photo. Just like that, without speaking, asking me to make sure she didn\u2019t stand out in the crowd. She was really pretty, all made-up, very tiny, with a hunchback. I was so sorry that I ran into the sea \u2013 camera and all, and got the film wet. When I developed the film later, I noticed that her disability was not visible. A photo came out on top of another and she became huge. I swore never to photograph people with disabilities again. It\u2019s like taking photographs of street kids. There was a time that I would do it, but then I thought it was a sad thing to do.<\/p>\n

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Gilberto Gil e Sandra Gadelha gr\u00e1vida<\/em>, Itapo\u00e3, Bahia, 1976<\/p><\/div>\n

When I hear this story, I recall that you usually ask the person you are photographing if you can take their photo. You are always looking for a close and trusting relationship with your model. This can be seen in your photographs. Is it a rule of yours to establish this intimacy with your model?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a rule, as such, but a habit. A way of getting closer to someone. You can\u2019t just plonk yourself in front of them with an enormous camera. I photographed people in Diamantina, on one of those big boulders there, and a lady had never seen a camera before. It is aggressive to arrive click, click, clicking away. In a situation like this, you even need to explain what you\u2019ve got in your hand, so that they don\u2019t think it is a gun.<\/p>\n

Reginaldo Bonfim, a wonderful painter, who used to stay in front of a church\u2019s door in Bahia, would swear at me because he was schizophrenic. When he saw me, he would say: \u201cDon\u2019t come here to photograph!\u201d I would reply: \u201cOh, all right then, bye!\u201d One day he changed his mind. \u201cLook! Today is Good Friday, you can photograph.\u201d I went to Reginaldo\u2019s home. I have a panel painted by him in the kitchen of my house in Bahia. We became great friends. He was really smart, had a college degree. Once a guy rang me to ask: \u201cWhat did you think of this man? He was my classmate here at the School of Fine Art.\u201d I hadn\u2019t known that. I tried to find out more about his story, and it was true. I had that type of relationship with my models.<\/p>\n

Another case is the photograph I took of a street photographer who used to work in the same place. I would hide myself, sitting down, like someone who didn\u2019t want anything, just to tease him. When he put the cloth over his head, I photographed him. He used to swear at me too. It\u2019s one of the best photographs I have, of the square photographer taking a picture of a boy all dressed up in a suit.<\/p>\n

You have an intimate relationship with Brazilian popular music, above all that of Bahia, and you have works published in out- standing albums such as Cores, nomes<\/em> [colors, names] (1982) by Caetano Veloso. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Nowadays, I\u2019m not intimate with anyone. I was young, very young, quite a groupie, I wanted to date the musicians, and that\u2019s how I photographed them. I took advantage of this and sold the photographs to the press, too. I knew Gilberto Gil. He had a fianc\u00e9, Belina, who would become his first wife, who used to live in the neighborhood where I lived as a child. I got closer to him as a fan, a groupie, and then became really friendly with Sandra, who would marry Gil later, and Ded\u00e9, Caetano\u2019s first wife and the mother of Moreno, who baptized my child. They were sisters. The boys were more or less the same age and were really good friends for a time. As for the photograph which was used on the back of the album, I was at his birthday party and photographed him when his father gave him a kiss, which was on the mouth. It was when we were singing \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d, his 41st birthday, if I\u2019m not mistaken. I showed the contact prints and Caetano said: \u201cI\u2019m going to use this photo on my album.\u201d<\/p>\n

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H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Rocha (neta de Glauber)<\/em>, Rio de Janeiro, 1989<\/p><\/div>\n

How was it to be backstage and make choices to photograph these icons? In the photos of Ney Matogrosso, for instance, it is possible to notice that a camera was close to him, deeply intimate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was a very good friend of everyone I photographed. Such as when I photographed Dorival Caymmi in Rome in 1983, when he was filming Bahia de todos os sambas<\/em> [Bahia of all sambas] (a documentary by Paulo C\u00e9sar Saraceni and Leon Hirszman). Not long before that, we had talked a lot about Orix\u00e1s, about Bahia, we became friends. As for the one of Ney on the beach, I love Ney. He\u2019s still a good friend. At the time, I used to go to the beach at Posto 9, where a bunch of us would hang out. So, this you are saying that people were relaxed is because we were at their place, chatting\u2026 I think the only musician I photographed who I have the feeling I didn\u2019t really know was Peter Tosh. Scarlet Moon asked me to do a story with her, a journalistic double-act \u2013 she was the reporter, me the photographer.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s about it, it\u2019s the intimacy of love that I had and would have at the time. That\u2019s my reply. The one of Caetano with the flower, for example, I was in his house, about February 2nd. You could see the Iemanj\u00e1 festival from his house. I went there with Ded\u00e9 and when the flower fell on his head, he picked it up and put it behind his ear. See? So there are these lucky moments, these coincidences.<\/p>\n

Perhaps there was this question of luck, as you say, but there\u2019s also a lot of focus, isn\u2019t there?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fact that I\u2019d been an actor, performed, had a theater group \u2013 I had a theater group at school, high school from when I was fourteen, then I had a semi-professional group \u2013 that helps us to relax. We actually put on a play, Nosso c\u00e9u tem mais estrelas<\/em> [our sky has more stars] at the Castro Alves Theater. For example, the other day I returned to doing films. Taking still photographs is a job that becomes a bit laborious after a certain age, but I love doing it, I really identify with it. I photographed the TV series \u00d3 pa\u00ed, \u00f3<\/em> [look at this]. All of a sudden, I was in the middle of them and felt like I belonged to the group. I became a good friend of L\u00e1zaro Ramos. He\u2019s actually got some of my photos \u2013 the capoeira series \u2013 in his house.<\/p>\n

There are stories behind my photos, about which I say: \u201cOne day I\u2019m going to photograph this girl.\u201d Like the girl on the steps. Every day she would ask me to photograph her, but I was always in a hurry, because I was going to work at Lambe-Lambe, and I thought: \u201cOne day, I\u2019m going to photograph this girl!\u201d So, all of a sudden, at Christmas day, I photographed the girl and all her siblings on the steps of Ladeira do Carmo. The fact that I was an actress opens doors. I saw this when I was photographing the series \u00d3 pa\u00ed, \u00f3<\/em>. One day I even worked as an actress, playing an extra, it was a laugh. They said they needed someone, and I said: \u201cI\u2019ll do it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Do you plan your photographs?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To be honest, no. I would like to, but no. Sometimes I\u2019m going by somewhere and say something like \u201cI want to photograph this,\u201d if by any chance I have my camera with me. I feel like photographing the old houses near my house in Salvador. Because I still have a house in Santo Ant\u00f4nio in the historic center of the city, in front of the Pelourinho, where there are a lot of abandoned buildings.<\/p>\n

Photographs of children are also essential in your career, aren\u2019t they?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I started by photographing my son. There was a time when I would photograph the children of famous people on their birthdays, to sell to their parents. I\u2019ve actually got a project on the go that I\u2019m going to do, it\u2019s called As meninas<\/em> [the girls]. I like Lygia Fagundes Telles, who wrote a book with this title. The girls are my son\u2019s playmates, the daughters of my friends, people like Manuela Dias, Preta Gil… They\u2019re all strong women, really famous and my buddies until today. I\u2019ve already spoken to them and they\u2019ve said OK, and I would like to do an exhibition.<\/p>\n\r\n