Filmmaker, screenplay writer and photographer, Jorge Bodanzky, who directed the classic Iracema, and will open a retrospective show at MIS-SP in June 2016, had his photographic and super-8 archives bought by Instituto Moreira Salles. 

For ZUM’s website, Bodanzky interviews German photographer Michael Wesely about his series Potsdamer Platz, published on ZUM #10. Destroyed after World War II, the square in Berlin was divided by the Wall during the Cold War. Michael Wesely talks about the place’s urbanistic and social importance, whose reconstruction after the fall of the Wall he documented with long exposures that last for years, and unveils details of this process.

“These images talk basically about the rebirth of a place, of a urbanity that was missing there for so long”, says Wesely. “They are talking about geopolitical changes, the collapse of the wall, the collapse of the communist idea in Europe, the big division that ran through Berlin, and it’s about a healing process not only in architecture but that manifests in architecture: people got back together, the city got back together.”///

 

Jorge Bodanzky was born in São Paulo, in 1942, and took up photography thanks to the encouragement of Amélia Toledo and Athos Bulcão, Bodanzky’s tutors at the University of Brasília where he studied architecture. When the University of Brasilia closed in 1965, Jorge began working for the magazine Manchete and the newspaper Jornal da Tarde. The following year, he financed his film studies in Germany by working as a photographer for the newspaper Ulmer Donauzeitung. In 1968, having returned to Brazil, he worked as a freelance photographer for the magazines Íris and Realidade. His debut as director was in Iracema (1974), after working in ten feature length movies between 1968 and 1974. The movie’s international repercussion (it was censored in Brazil until 1980) would send him towards the filmmaker career, a seesawing movement that would only return to photography after the 2000s.

Michael Wesely (1963) is a photographer. He was born in Munich and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in that city. He participated in the 25th Biennial of São Paulo. He published Arquivo Brasília (Cosac Naify, 2010), in partnership with Lina Kim, and Time Works (Schirmer/Mosel, 2010). The photographer is currently developing the Open Shutter project, in which he documents with long exposures the building of Instituto Moreira Salles’ new headquarters in São Paulo.