Brazilian Modernist Photography in the Itaú Collection Photography Was Born Technological, in The

Everlastingly Modern – Brazilian Modernist Photography in the Itaú Collection Photography was born technological, in the era of metropolises, great scientific discoveries and inventions, and above all in the capitalist age, where the order of the day was to transform everything and everybody. In few media is the eternal controversy about the limits between art, documentation and science so central as in photography. Brazil's modernists brought this debate into the darkroom and turned their own alchemic escapades into full-blown debates about the language of photography. What is more, they dared to look at the post-war world subjectively. A word of warning: Brazil's modernism is a late- comer; the movement took off in Brazil in the 1940s, whereas in neighboring countries and in Europe it had arisen two decades before this. With hindsight, these movements are clearly a rupture with traditionalism, bringing in a new esthetic reading and a crucial distancing from the prevailing institutionalized culture, through an unprecedented expansion in the history of images. The European Vanguard movements that culminated in Cubism and surrealism were already opening their frontiers in the 1920s, and the redefinition of photography—as a Brazilian “modern photography”—flourished in the following years in parallel with such movements as the Bauhaus and with such artists as László Moholy-Nagy, who were pioneers in the inclusion of photography, paving the way for young practitioners such as Lux Feininger. We can see similarities between the chromatic contrasts of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and the images José Yalenti created from architecture. Alongside this photographer we find exemplary representatives of the period such as German Lorca, José Oiticica Filho, Eduardo Salvatore and Geraldo de Barros, whose relations with the arts in general can be seen as far-reaching and daring. Representatives of the so-called Paulista School ("Escola Paulista"), acknowledged by historians to be the cornerstone of “modernist photography”, founded Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante in 1939 and definitively broke with the established. But, to echo the excellent question historian Ricardo Mendes poses in his Fotografia e Modernismo: um Breve Ensaio sobre Ideias Fora do Lugar ("Photography and Modernism: a Brief Essay on Out-of-Place Ideas"): what manifestations of modernity are we looking for? The great merit of Brazil's Modernist output is that it questioned things, rather than providing easily-assimilated explanations and readings. This exhibition takes the best of the movement as the basis of its challenge, and provides— beyond the esthesis it provokes—a more wide-ranging discussion of the essence of photography, overthrowing paradigms and marching through decades in the disruptions made by itself. And here one might ask a question: how exactly did the creative process of these photographers, ignoring the strict rules of documentary photography, or the then “realist” photography to which this art had seen itself attached since its earliest manifestations, come about? The images themselves suggest clues as to the answers to the most pressing questions. They follow a wide range of different paths, through domestic and international artistic salons, with labels that prove that it was not only in the field of the manipulation of images in a darkroom that the modern photographers incubated ideas. Photo-clubs, the first social networks we know of in photography, with their salons, catalogues and competitions, comprised an international network enabling people to see what was being produced in the world's greatest centers of photography and display what was being produced in Brazil, well before today's blogs, Facebooks and Flickrs! Inevitably, we find an analogy with Brazilian architecture. While it made use of international modernism, it devoured it, transmogrified it and regurgitated a new style. As anthropologist Lauro Cavalcanti writes in his Moderno e Brasileiro – História de uma Nova Linguagem da Arquitetura ("Modern and Brazilian—the History of a New Language in Architecture (1930-1960)"), the influence of socio-political and economic transformations around the world was felt in Brazilian photo clubs, where art was digested and then transformed into a new photography, with a tropical and essentially creative reading. We should notice that most of the photographers in this exhibition came from Europe or are descended from Europeans. Many were refugees from Northern hemisphere wars, a counterpoint that establishes here in Brazil a unique artistic cradle giving rise to photographic output of a certain optimism, of a certain hope in the future, unlike the European movement, beset by more urgent difficulties. Photographers such as the Catalan Marcel Giró—who enlisted as a volunteer in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War one decade before settling in São Paulo in the 1950s—never fully freed themselves of a documental responsibility forged in inter-War experience. Even when absorbed by shapes, by geometries and by a range of modernist experimentation in the Escola Paulista, his photographs betray his preoccupation with documenting the transformations that cities were undergoing, and industrialization and modernity. Many of the photographers, such as German Lorca, José Yalenti and Geraldo de Barros, eventually broke their modernist shackles and produced photographs over long periods of time, proving that the movement was essentially substantive, dense, and extremely important in the subsequent sharing of so-called contemporary art. This influence still reverberates in more recent photographers. German Lorca, in Andaime ("Scaffolding"), casts an ironic gaze on the banal. In Mondrian, while paying tribute to the Dutch master, he is thought-provoking. Paulo Pires, founder of the Íris Foto Grupo in São Carlos, lays bare Oscar Niemeyer's Copan Building, the ultimate symbol of "paulistana" architecture. In Linhas, he moves between the vast scale of an architectural work and its most intimate details, elements that were to be constant in the photography of photo club members. This movement between abstractionism and surrealism, two virtually opposed forms, is what is best in the work of José Yalenti, and is found in Visão Atlética ("Athletic Vision") and Paralelas e Diagonais (Parallels and Diagonals"). These challenges to the formal and the methodical are frequently found in the "tropicalist" character of Brazilian photography. After all, Brazilian photography was never laden with the weight of centuries of European painting. Despite often being informal, Brazilian photography never turned its back on the graphic rigor and consistency of a well-thought-out creative work. It goes beyond that with more conceptual concerns, formatting quite other discussions, such as a questioning as to whether what we see is real or imagined, a proposal that is contained in Eduardo Enfeldt's Escala em Branco ("White Scale"), which essentially addresses perception. But where does an image's illusion begin and its reality end? In their rupture, the moderns follow opposing paths. They can, for example, abandon the abstract for figurative form. There are no rules imposed, except for good aesthetic expression. And this we can see in Ademar Manarini's work or in Arabescos em Branco ("White Arabesques") by Gertrudes Altschul, one of the few women members of photography clubs at the time. Geometry and abstractionism also lead us to Eduardo Salvatore's Formas ("Shapes"). This very important photographer founded Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante and was chairman of the entity from 1943 to 1990. Scavone foreshadowed much of contemporary photography with his Abstração #5, an image of torn street posters, within a futuristic vision of today's recycling; just like Manarini's work, which, by approaching Manuel Alvares Bravo's Mexican Modernist school, foreshadows the great social phase Brazilian photography would live through in the 1960s. With Manarini, the social element becomes singularly important through the human figure, through the popular and even by means of the unusual words graffitied on a wall: “Everlasting war on Stalin”. Many of these works have never been seen outside the photo club circuit, surviving in often precarious storage conditions. They are examples of the work of true authors, many of them virtually unknown to a wider audience, who pushed the bounds of photographic alchemy: with photograms, solarizations, overexposures, and a whole host of creative tricks that dark rooms enable. They will undoubtedly provoke thought and reflection. Visitors to this exhibition should be warned that its curator's design incorporates the play of modernism, just as Fred Teixeira's graphic design for the exhibition drinks from the same fountain as the modernists, with references to the work of architect Theo van Doesburg and his notion of the construction of a modern continuous space. Everlastingly modern! Iatã Cannabrava* curator *with the help of Juan Esteves .

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