CAIO REISEWITZ AT PARIS PHOTO 2013

Looking at cities – São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília

An exhibition presented by Instituto Moreira Salles at Paris Photo 2013

Grand Palais, Paris

14 – 17 November 2013

Photography arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1840, when most Brazilian cities were small rural villages. Since then, we have seen megalopolis spring across the country. Some of them, like São Paulo, with around 25,000 inhabitants at that time, is now home to 20 million people. And the capital, Brasília, strategically located in the heart of the country, was built just sixty years ago where there used to be only retorted trees and shrubs.

Urban and natural landscapes, and its transformations, have been one of the main subjects of Brazilian photography and of Instituto Moreira Salles’s photography collection of 900,000 images. This exhibition shows how Brazilian cities have been pictured by photographers and artists while changing and expanding in new and interesting ways.

The growing economy of the last decades has intensified these changes, asking artists to search for new visual practices to represent their surroundings. The time frame also coincides with the new status photography has achieved on the art market. The exhibition presents classical, modernist and contemporary approaches. One of the new acquisitions, the work of Mauro Restiffe on the Luz neighborhood in downtown São Paulo show recent urban transformations with very large analog prints to represent decay and question renovation. Caio Reisewitz’s recent works, large and small, investigate the boundary where constructed and natural landscape (and imagery) meet, the same boundary that seduced Marc Ferrez since his early works in the 1860’s. Photographer Marcel Gautherot, – who was for Oscar Niemeyer’s work what Lucien Hervé was for Le Corbusier’s, documented the construction of Brasília in the late 1950’s. Some years later his formal, tectonic images would be echoed by the then young photographer and would be film-maker Jorge Bodanzky’s cinematic approach of the new capital, produced on the same year Brazil submerged under twenty years of military dictatorship (1964-1985). Other artists, like Rosangela Rennó, use the book form to investigate photography as history, as art and as value, in a country where less than two-hundred years of incommensurable change have transformed the historical photographic legacy both in objects of knowledge and also of desire and greed.

Since its foundation in 1992, IMS has been a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation, research and interpretation, through critical thinking, of Brazilian culture. In keeping with this mission, it has elected photography as its priority field of activity. In 2011, IMS launched ZUM, a contemporary photography magazine, and started collecting Brazilian contemporary photography on a regular basis.

Sergio Burgi – Photography Coordinator

Thyago Nogueira – Contemporary Photography Coordinator, ZUM Magazine Editor