Mapping Brazil - Photography: Contemporary photography in Brazil

Contemporary photography in Brazil
One aspect of Brazilian contemporary photography worth highlighting is the conscious use of different languages rooted in different conceptual approaches, like the construction of staged images and/or internal narratives in works that combine the documentary with the imaginary, as in the pioneering collective work of João Castilho, Pedro Motta and Pedro David, Paisagem Submersa, published in 2008. Meanwhile, with contemporary digital equipment it is possible to build narratives by recording series of partial documentary elements which, when combined, formulate a discourse about the whole, drawing nearer to the language of journalism and reportage while also expanding on and questioning the circulation of information through new channels of communication like the internet, and incorporating moving images into the process, as in the works by collectives Cia da Foto and Midia Ninja in the June 2013 protests.

In work such as Mauro Restiffe’s investigations of Luz, a district in the centre of São Paulo, recent urban transformations are depicted using black-and-white 35mm photographic films and large-scale analogue prints in a bid to express both decadence and the potential for renewal. Meanwhile, Caio Reisewitz’s recent large- and small-scale collages investigate urban landscapes mediated by the intense presence of wildlife, working on the threshold between the built and natural landscapes – the same boundary that seduced Marc Ferrez in Rio de Janeiro in the 1860s.

Marcel Gautherot, whose photographs of architecture are to Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings what Lucien Hervé’s photographs are to Le Corbusier’s, comprehensively documented the building of Brasilia in the late 1950s. Less than six years later, his formal tectonic images sparked cross-generational interaction with the young photographer and future filmmaker Jorge Bodanzky, who made an almost cinematographic interpretation of the new capital city on the brink of the 20-year military regime as of 1964. Other artists, like Rosângela Rennó, use the photobook format to expose the problematic relationship between photography, collectionism and historical heritage in a country where photographic legacies run the risk of being seen as mere objects of desire.

These are some of the photographic strategies adopted by contemporary photographers in the construction of their work.

According to Vilém Flusser, photography marked a new phase in the history of communication and culture. It began what he calls the technical image – a concept that forms the backbone of his main essays on the subject, like Filosofia da caixa preta – Ensaios para uma futura filosofia da fotografia [“Philosophy of the black box – essays for a future philosophy of photography”] and O universo das imagens técnicas [“The universe of technical images”]. Flusser, a Czech Jew, migrated to Brazil in the early 1940s, where he settled and lectured in the philosophy of science and philosophy of communication at the University of São Paulo, while also taking part actively in the city’s artistic life, including as a contributor to the literary supplement of O Estado de São Paulo newspaper and the São Paulo Biennial. He published his first book, Língua e realidade [“Language and Reality”], in 1963. His interest in the production and flow of images in society and contemporary culture peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s. About this new attitude towards culture, Flusser wrote in the introduction of O universo das imagens técnicas:

This essay is about the universe of technical images, the universe which, in recent decades, has made use of photographs, films, videos, television screens and computer terminals to take over the task previously performed by linear texts, namely the task of transmitting crucial information to society and individuals. It is concerned with a cultural revolution whose reach and implications we are only beginning to sense. Given that for their lives and livelihoods, human beings depend more on knowledge acquired and less on genetic information than other living beings, the structure by which information is conveyed has a decisive influence on our lives. When images supplant texts, we experience, perceive and value the world and ourselves in a different way, no longer in a linear process, a one-dimensional, historical, predominantly process-oriented form, but as a two-dimensional form with surface, context and scene. And our behaviour changes: it is no longer dramatic, but embedded in fields of relationships. What is happening now is a mutation of our experiences, perceptions, values and modes of behaviour, a mutation of our being in the world.

Flusser’s thoughts at the time he lived in Brazil (1941-1972) are very much in line with post-modern thinking in the arts and culture. In the 1960s and 70s, artists and conceptual photographers set the terms and conditions by which artistic photography would be defined in relation to itself and the other arts. The photography that emerged from the intense post-modern experiments at this time took a stance as an artistic manifestation, and evolved explicitly thenceforth through the ongoing dynamic of self-criticism.

The analytical rigor of the critical discourse of modernity led to the revolution of abstract and experimental art, and then the rejection of figurative description and the role of art as delineation and representation. It was through self-criticism that painting and sculpture distanced themselves from figurative description, which had been constituted historically on fundamental social and artistic values. Even for the photographers influenced by this discourse, as indicated by Clement Greenberg, the historical development of photography towards a modern discourse was limited by the fact that, unlike other fields of the visual arts, it could not supersede figurative description. It therefore appeared that it could not embark on the very adventure it had first made feasible, if we consider that the historical process of modern art owes its beginnings to the emergence of photography as an essentially representative art form during the industrial revolution. Even after this intense period of self-criticism, photography continued to be a system for figurative description and for documenting and representing reality. It is no surprise that photographers from the modern period from every continent first explored the more formal and abstract features of the medium to later return partially to a more documentary and humanistic photography, either in photojournalism or in portraiture or in authorial projects. This process can be seen in the trajectories of figures like Paul Strand, Man Ray, André Kertész, Aleksandr Ródtchenko and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and in Brazil in Thomaz Farkas and other photographers working between the 1910s and 1960s.

Given the specific features of the world of photography, it would be fair to say that contemporary photography has critically reconstituted the pictorial tradition based on figurative representation, potentially transcending the major contributions of modern and contemporary art without failing to incorporate issues brought to the artistic debate by post-modern avant-gardes. It is in this context that we should understand the contemporary branches of documentary and figurative expression, such as those developed by the Dusseldorf School, with the work of the Bechers and the subsequent generation of students, like Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer, and those of photographers like Jeff Wall, who throughout his career has discussed the role of the figurative in contemporary photography.

It is in this context that Vilém Flusser also analyses the role of the author-photographer in a contemporary society awash with images. The author-photographer, he says, is the only subject capable of breaking the systemic process of mimesis of reality produced in mass by photography in a permanent process of alienation and reaffirmation of the system based on the intrinsic figurative aspect of the technical image. According to Flusser, in the absence of any critical action by such author-photographers, “the present-day interaction between images and human beings will lead to a loss of historical awareness in those who receive the images and as a consequence also the loss of any historical action that could result from the reception of the image itself.”

In this sense, both the fundamental issue of self-criticism that characterises contemporary photography and the critical curatorial interpretation of modern and historical photography of a clearly authorial nature are key for incorporating the huge volume of images into the contemporary cultural process of the critical construction of knowledge. According to Flusser, living as a function of equipment means continuing to live on the surface of black boxes, which obscure and weaken the senses. Liberty is therefore achieved by becoming aware of the structures that rule images, information, programmes and equipment. Flusser says that “the task of the philosophy of photography is to direct the questioning of freedom to photographers. [...] A pressing philosophy because it is arguably the only revolution that is still possible.” The dilemma, as Flusser indicates, resides precisely in the production and critical use of technical images in the contemporary world: “their purpose is to be maps for the world, but they end up being dividers. Man, rather than making use of images as a function of the world, starts to live as a function of images.”

Making a profound, critical interpretation of historical, modern and contemporary photographic archives therefore constitutes a potential way to effectively contribute towards understanding the structures that form contemporary society both on the direct and objective plane of documenting material culture and on the more abstract plane of symbolic and creative representation of these structures.

This critical process is increasingly present in Brazil’s photography scene in academia (at undergraduate and postgraduate level), in memory preservation institutions (libraries, archives), in the photography-related arts circuit (museums, cultural centres), in festivals of photography, and in the work of photographers, visual artists, curators, researchers, critics, editors and all those who keep the wheels of the cultural scene of photography rolling throughout the country.

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