Mapping Brazil - Photography: Photography in São Paulo after 1930

Photography in São Paulo after 1930
It is impossible to write about photography in São Paulo without considering the isolated discovery of the photographic process based on the light-sensitivity of silver salts in 1833 in Vila de São Carlos, São Paulo state, by Antoine Romuald Hercule Florence (1804 – 1879), a Frenchman who settled in Brazil in 1824, or the pioneering work of Militão Augusto de Azevedo (1837-1905), a photographer from Rio de Janeiro who moved to São Paulo in 1860 and produced the first systematic photographic documentation of the city, which he compiled in Álbum comparativo da cidade de São Paulo 1862 – 1887, which contains images taken from the same place 25 years apart.

Looking at the work of these two artists we can understand how important the creative contributions of foreigners and individuals from other parts of the country were for the development of São Paulo city and the construction of its representation over the years. The work of Militão demonstrates the decisive role of photography in documenting the exponential pace of urban growth the city underwent as of the second half of the nineteenth century. The city he documented in 1862 had just 30,000 inhabitants, compared to its present-day population of 20 million. Over these years of transformation, dozens of photographers representing the different photographic languages in vogue in São Paulo and Brazil recorded these changes.

The creative contributions of foreigners and people from other parts of the country were crucial for the development of São Paulo city and for the construction of its representation over the years. The crisis in Europe towards the end of the 1930s prompted a wave of emigration of professionals, intellectuals and artists to the Americas even before the war broke out, with São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro being the main destinations in Brazil for these German, Hungarian, Polish, French, Italian, Turkish and other nationals, most of whom were Jewish. Upon settling in Brazil, many became active members of industry, the media and the visual arts, helping to shape the modernisation of these sectors after the war.

The 1940s and 50s in São Paulo was therefore a unique moment when a number of vectors converged to foster an unprecedented period of industrialisation and development, which had a direct impact on the country’s communications and visual arts.

If we examine the changes that took place in three different yet strongly interlinked fields from communication and the arts between 1945 and 1955 – visual communication, through illustrated magazines, the visual arts circuit, including photography, and the modernisation of the printing industry and printed, radio and television advertising – we can see that the transformations in each field fed the others, and that together they contributed to the complete modernisation of photography in all its forms of expression: photojournalism, art photography and photography applied to advertising, industry, architecture and other fields.

In the case of O Cruzeiro, the initial plans to revamp this illustrated magazine, established in the early 1940s, by drawing on the intense use of photography and an emphasis on photoreportage, were modelled on French and German illustrated magazines like Vu, Voilá and Illustrierte Zeitung, although its focus changed again in the 1950s as more humanistic photojournalism gained ground. In São Paulo, the magazine’s main photographer was Peter Scheier (1908-1979), a German who lived in that city from 1939 to 1975. His portrayals of the working class district of Brás, the city’s poor small-scale Jewish businesses and leisure activities at the reservoirs that supplied the city’s water system are emblematic images from the period.

It was also at this time that advertising, especially in illustrated magazines, became more professional as advances were made in printing techniques (especially the use of offset). These new adverts made use of photographs taken in Brazil to sell products. Photography therefore became a key element in the mass media machinery to boost the flows of merchandise as urban and industrial development continued to grow in the country. In the specific area of industry-commissioned photography, Hans Gunter Flieg stands out for his extensive body of work portraying factories in São Paulo, helping companies to document their facilities, production activities, machinery, production lines and final products. Industrial design, which was taking its first steps in the country, using photography as an important ally for constructing the representation of the form and function of manufactured goods, was also the object of Flieg’s lens.

At the same time, the arts scene in São Paulo was going through a period of great ebullience with the creation of Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). Organised by amateur and professional photographers, it reflected the buoyant, creative artistic and cultural atmosphere in the post-war years in the city. It organised and promoted the São Paulo International Salons of Photography every year at Galeria Prestes Maia as of 1944, which attracted over 100,000 visitors in 1949 for the 30 days of the exhibition. The club also brought out Boletim do Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante as of 1946, a publication that gave voice to discussions about innovations in the aesthetics of photographic language.

Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante’s members at this time included Thomaz Farkas, Geraldo de Barros, German Lorca and Chico Albuquerque, who were particularly active from 1945 to 1955, holding their first solo exhibitions at Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM/SP) and Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), and making decisive contributions to the success of the pioneering Photography Room at the 2nd São Paulo International Biennial in December 1953 organised by FCCB, based on the work of its members from its archive selected by members of FCCB, including Geraldo de Barros, Eduardo Salvatore and Chico Albuquerque, under a curatorial line with clearly modernist leanings.

The work of Geraldo de Barros, German Lorca, Thomaz Farkas, Chico Albuquerque and others constitutes the formative period of modernist photography in Brazil, challenging, innovating and expanding on the language used in the ambit of photography clubs. The exhibitions of the work of Farkas at MAM/SP in 1949, Geraldo de Barros at MASP in 1951, German Lorca at MAM/SP in 1952 and Chico Albuquerque at MASP in 1952, alongside the already mentioned International São Paulo Salons of Photographic Art, opened up a space for modernity that allowed Brazilian photography to break away from the canons and paradigms of pictorialism. Their new, contemporary language reflected the radical pace of industrial and urban transformations in the country after the Second World War, with their natural impacts on the arts and culture.

In advertising, Chico Albuquerque, thanks to his standing as a well-known professional photographer, developed a professional relationship with the leading advertising agencies of the day, like McCann and Standard, and with Escola de Propaganda, an advertising college created in 1951 at the time when advertising photography was established in the country. His activity in this area culminated with the introduction of Estúdio Abril. As a consultant, Albuquerque built a structure inside the studio that operated as a “college of photography”, training a new generation of advertising photographers like Bob Wolfenson and Sergio Jorge.

In 1966, Editora Abril publishing house brought together a group of Brazilian and foreign photographers in São Paulo to create a new magazine, Realidade. The magazine counted on the work of American photographers Lew Parella, David Zingg and George Love; Hungarian-born Swiss national, Cláudia Andujar; Luigi Mamprim (Italian), Maureen Bisilliat and Roger Bester (British), Jean Solari (French), Walter Firmo (Brazilian) and other photographers, who, over the magazine’s ten-year existence, built a lasting legacy for Brazilian photojournalism and for the generation of photographers and visual artists who, in the 1980s and 1990s, developed photography as an autonomous language integrated into the arts circuit.

In the field of the arts, the 1960s also left the legacy of Wesley Duke Lee, a Brazilian artist who in 1963, together with Otto Stupakoff and others, formed a group devoted to magical realism. Stupakoff’s fashion photography studio on Rua Frei Caneca in São Paulo became a magnet for artists, photographers and intellectuals, who met up there in the early 1960s until 1964, when Stupakoff went to New York to work at Harper´s Bazaar with designer and editor Bia Feitler. Wesley Duke Lee also produced a series of photographs about São Paulo for a book called Paranóia (Editora Massao Ohno, 1963) by Roberto Piva, one of the most important photobooks in the country.

It was also in the 1960s that Villém Flusser taught the philosophy of science at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo and the philosophy of communication at Escola Superior de Cinema and Escola de Arte Dramática, also in São Paulo. He was a regular contributor to the literary supplement of O Estado de São Paulo newspaper and an active member of the city’s artistic life, being involved in the organisation of the Sao Paulo Biennial. His first book, Língua e realidade [“Language and Reality”] was published in 1963. Later, in 1983, Flusser published Filosofia da Caixa Preta: Ensaios para uma futura filosofia da fotografia [“Philosophy of the Black Box: essays for a future philosophy of photography”] essential reading for contemporary reflections about photography.

It was thanks to this intensive movement around photography in the 1960s and 70s that the 1980s witnessed the first generation of Brazilian photographers who occupied all the positions in communication and photojournalism, applied photography (architecture, advertising, studios, etc.) and photography teaching at academic establishments.

Between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, the University of São Paulo had a number of groups of photographers graduating from its faculties of architecture and communication under Cristiano Mascaro, João Luis Musa and Raul Garcez. Thomaz Farkas did a doctorate about documentary filmmaking and started lecturing at the University of São Paulo’s school of communication, while also working at Cinemateca Brasileira.

In the realm of photojournalism, independent agencies like Agência F4, owned by photographers Juca Martins and Nair Benedicto, built an important body of work about social and political issues in São Paulo and other parts of the country. MASP held an arts circuit, coordinated by Claudia Andujar and George Love, which included photography courses and exhibitions which became a reference in the city. Meanwhile, at MAC/USP, under the management of Walter Zanini, a photography department was set up and exhibitions were held by artists investigating the expressive potential of photography. ENFOCO (1968 – 1976), a photography school run by Cláudio Kubrusly, also brought together a significant number of teachers and students, many of whom went on to work in different areas of photography in the following decades.

Another impetus for the development of photography at this time was the creation of Revista Fotóptica and Galeria Fotóptica in 1975 and 1979, respectively, by Thomaz Farkas. The pieces published in the magazine and the exhibitions held at the gallery, mostly of works by the photographers already mentioned, were instrumental in consolidating photography in the arts circuit as of the late 1990s.

This photography milieu in São Paulo, building on the earlier contributions by foreign photographers who had settled in the city, reached a distinct phase in the 1980s and 90s, when a new generation of photographers and visual artists who had been born in the country and had studied at its academic institutions formulated what became the city’s and country’s contemporary photography. The main protagonists of this movement were Mauro Restiffe, Caio Reisewitz, Bob Wolfenson, Cássio Vasconcelos, Chris Bierrenbach and Rubens Mano.

The first bachelor’s degree in photography in the country was only created in 1999 at SENAC (São Paulo). Many other undergraduate and postgraduate courses followed in its wake. São Paulo is therefore the ultimate proof of photography as an itinerant language, where the movement of images and individuals throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created an intense synergy between local and international photography, resulting in instigating contemporary output and a growing process of critical reflection and research into the field in the city throughout its history, many aspects of which are effectively transnational, in keeping with the city’s cosmopolitan nature.

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