fotografia
Modern Photography in Brazil
The emergence of modern photography in Brazil is directly related to São Paulo’s Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante. The Brazilian photoclub movement had hitherto kept very close ties with international pictorialism, whose main guideline was to give an artistic orientation to photography, based only on aesthetic patterns originating from different painting styles and theories, that is, elements from academicism, naturalism, impressionism and symbolism. In this way, pictorialists would try to deny in their works both the realism always present in the photographic image and the reproducible nature of photograph.
In the 1940s, the panorama of photography at FCCB underwent a transformation. São Paulo’s photographers broke with the academic style of the pictorial movement. Therefore, by freeing themselves from classic themes, dogmas and the pre-established pictorialism formal rules, photographers strated a new visuality that was marked by the investigation of such technical resources inherent in the photographic medium, influenced by the European modernist avant-garde. The artists from such avant-garde movements as Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Constructivism and Bauhaus realized the enormous potential present in the photographic medium to translate the historical-perceptual change, as well as the demands posed by the urban and technological era.
The first period of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante became known as the “pioneers’ phase”. In the early 1940s, Thomaz Farkas and Geraldo de Barros led a radical break in the photographic language. The look was directed to more banal and everyday elements of reality, being attracted by the possibility of abstraction inherent to forms. Therefore, unusual rhythms, textures, planes and angles, in addition to the frequent use of light and dark are often found in the geometrization of subjects in their images. In addition, direct interventions are made in the photographic process by using multiple exposure of the same film or through cutouts, overlays and drawings made directly on the negative.
The second generation of the FCCB, known as Escola Paulista, which continued the aesthetic research initiated by the precursors, followed the “pioneer’s phase”. The photographers from the “Generation of the 50s”, formed by Eduardo Salvatore, Marcel Giró, Roberto Yoshida, Gertrudes Altschul, Ademar Manarini, Gaspar Gasparian, Ivo Ferreira and João Bizarro Nave Filho, would use the light/dark concept in their images, thus emphasizing to the constitutive lines of force of the subject, and they would seek to highlight in their compositions both the abstract character of the theme and the geometry of the object. The use of a photogram is regarded as being part of the abstractionist research. At such moment, the photographer would dispense with the camera and place the objects on the photographic paper, exposing them to light, and passing them later on in the development. This process would take place inside the photographic laboratory.
The importance of the images produced by the members of the so-called Escola Paulista de Fotografia was evidenced in a seminal exhibition presented in a special room at the II São Paulo International Arts Biennial, which took place between December 1953 and February 1954, during the celebrations of the IV Centennial of the city of São Paulo.
In this way, it can be said that the development of modern Brazilian photography, even if late, was conceived and promoted both within photo clubs and in photo exhibition rooms created by those groups of photographers to publicize their production.