Artist

SP-Foto | Desnorte (Adrift)

Academic

collector

Curator

gallerist

Bob Wolfenson

Áudio (Português)

This work "On the Way to the Sea" - and this is the symbolic photo of the work - was done in 2007, still with the 8x10 camera, the last large analog work I did. And this place, Cubatão, here in the passage between the city of São Paulo and the coast, was a place of my evocations, a place where I used to pass by as a child, it was a border between leisure and duty. In other words, when I saw Cubatão, when I was a child, I saw the possibility of going on vacation, the beach, all that. At the same time, those images brought me a certain ambiguity. The existence of Cubatão was repulsive because of the air pollution, but in a way, it was very attractive for a child, that profusion of lights, vapors, chimneys. So, with this feeling of ambiguity, I grew up, and one day I passed there and said, I want to do a work here, with this dreary, heavy atmosphere, almost like a horror movie. But at the same time, it is very aesthetic; it is beautiful, in a sense. And Cubatão, for those who don’t know, is a petrochemical center, close to the city of São Paulo, from the 50s, and it is a place where the air became so polluted that, in the 80s, defective children began to be born, without limbs, it was a terrible time.

Galeria Millan

Biruta, da série A Caminho do Mar (Windsock, from the series On the Way to the Sea)

This photo is also in the tradition of those photos I took of Maitê Proença, of incorporating local people. But I like it because it has this very Brazilian thing, the model is Brazilian, the boys are Brazilian, it is in Salvador, Bahia, I mean, it has a deep Brazil. The Sons of Gandhi is an afoxé group from Bahia. It has this cool thing, of celebration, all black and beautiful, a beauty and wonderful black nobility. Fashion photographs are always fictions; they are sketches, fragments, using elements from reality. So this is a characteristic of my fashion work, it is always fictional, because fashion photography is fictional, and it uses elements from reality, a construction with elements of reality, and then you remain in this ambiguity, if it is real, if it is not. This game between reality and fiction is left open and it is also a chronicle of an era, the history of clothing, how people were, how they dressed in those years. This is a photo from 2010 or 2012.

Gracie Carvalho e os Filhos de Gandhi (Gracie Carvalho and the Sons of Gandhi)

This is perhaps my most iconic, best known, most publicized, most consumed photo. It is a portrait that I made of Caetano Veloso in the 1980s, for Vogue magazine, a commissioned photo. And I had a habit of photographing people and asking them to raise their eyebrows. I don't know why I did it, but I thought it gave something, it's funny, because when you photograph a lot of people you know, it's a very difficult job because you have to seek some originality in the one who is photographed a lot, in the one whose image is worn out. And Caetano himself, he had this ability with his eye, which I didn't know he had: when I asked to raise his eyebrow, he raised it, in fact it is a series of photos with him and he was a bit cubist, he became a cubist character, and then the photo gained a great meaning, because Caetano is this guy who has this bigger eye, he has a lighthouse that at the same time illuminates, captures, sees, is a visionary. This photo reminds me of a photo of Picasso, made by Irving Penn, whose eye is also very lively.

Caetano Veloso

In this work, Arrests, this photo of the Shopping Cart, I once saw a photo in the newspaper of the arrest of a large Colombian drug dealer, the photos were for the public sale, it was a small photo in a São Paulo newspaper. And when I saw in the photo all the seized objects arranged, side by side, I thought this was a ready, complete contemporary art installation, without the need of any human intrusion. It was ready to shoot, there was everything there, all the tragedy, all the Brazils and our tragedy. And I wanted to do a work on it, but not photo-journalistically, I wanted to do it in a way where the intrinsic violence of objects could surface. In other words, I wanted it to be in high definition, that I could make big prints. I made an exhibition of this work at USP's Maria Antônia Center, in 2010. It took me 2 years negotiating with the authorities, and when I arrived at the São Paulo Forum, which was the first place I had access, the first thing I saw was this shopping cart full of guns. This was a ready-made. It was a ready-made thing that I didn't even had to think about, it was ready to shoot, it had already all the information, of all kinds of symbols. This photo became the poster for the exhibition, and from this picture, I developed all the work.

Armas no carrinho, da série Apreensões (Guns in the shopping cart, from the series Arrests)

Well, this is the photo of Gisele Bündchen, in an essay made for Vogue. I worked and work a lot as a fashion photographer, nowadays, less. And this photo was a work done in honor of her, the entire magazine dedicated to her, with several photographers. And that was the part given to me, she should personify a Brazilian singer named Clara Nunes, who curiously she didn't know, but when we put on a Clara Nunes song, due to some kind of connection that was established at the moment, she did the same movements, the same dance Clara used to do, without ever hearing Clara Nunes or knowing who she was. That impressed me a lot, because it was a connection at the moment. Anyway, the photo came out that way.

Gisele Bündchen

This photo of Copan belongs to a series I took in 2004, when I did a work called Anti-facade, with an exhibition at the Museum of Brazilian Art, of photos also taken with the 8x10 camera in the city of São Paulo, and all that started from an evocative thing, strolling through downtown São Paulo, on a winter afternoon, very melancholy. I only photographed people, but at the beginning of my photographic initiation, I photographed places. And then I connected to that, I wanted to do a work on this city. I lived in this neighborhood, Bom Retiro, whose buildings were very close to my vision; they placed themselves in front of my view of the world. They were always very close to my window. So this feeling of claustrophobia I wanted to put in this work. I based it on the color of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, where there was that heat in the images. And I wanted these photos to give off that heat. And I went to take these photos, in the tradition of this German 8x10 photography, which Andreas Gursky was already doing, even in that same place, from a different angle. And this is a photo that has become symbolic in this work; but it is a big series, with many photos.

Copan, da série Antifachada (Copan, from the series Anti-facade)

This photo is from a series that I exhibited in 2017, at the Milan Gallery, but I keep doing it. It is a series that I started in 2012, in which I go around the world photographing people a moment before crossing the street, in many places where I walk. I really like this work, I gave it a more cinematic character, with this panavision canvas, to focus especially on people, as a portrait of contemporary life, all mixed up, because there is behavior, fashion, climate, spirit of the time... And this picture of Miami is one of the most colorful, one of the most visually attractive.

Miami, da série Nósoutros (Miami, from the series Ourselves)

This is the fashion work I did in Marrakesh in 1987, with the model Virginia Punko, a Brazilian model, and we were in Marrakesh taking pictures at the Bahia Palace. And suddenly these children entered. Naturally, as a fashion photographer, I lowered the camera so as not to photograph with the children, because that would not go published at the magazine, there was a kind of interdiction in magazines at the time, and that was forbidden. But I immediately raised the camera again and said: this is the picture, with these children there. And they were paralyzed in front of Virginia, who is almost a totem, who they had never seen, and the cultural shock was also big, with this tall, white model and these Moroccan children, with different rites and rituals. It is interesting because the photo published by the magazine was the one without the children, but I kept this photo for myself because I think it is extraordinary. And it is a photo from far 1987.

Virginia Punko

This portrait of the great architect Oscar Niemeyer was on the occasion of my first major exhibition of portraits, at the São Paulo Museum of Art in 1996, and there was no one commissioning me for this portrait, it was my own initiative, I wanted to do it myself. And through my connections, I managed to get to him. And the photo I published in the book was a more neutral photo, with a white background, where the narrative was just his facial geography, with his clothes. And whenever I do a portrait, I experience the situations. I don't just shoot with the initial premises; I follow the flow of events. And I went into that room, I saw the Pão De Açúcar back there, I wanted to contextualize him in this Rio environment. And the first question he asked me, he didn't have patience to be photographed, and I think he is correct, and so he asked me: why do you photograph men? Because he was totally fanatic about feminine beauty, I mean, the curves of his work were all based on this feminine thing. And in fact, my tradition as a fashion photographer was to photograph a lot of women, the nudes. And I said: no, I don't photograph men; I made an exception for you. And it was very fun, because from my answer he got relaxed, he gave himself more, and we managed to do the work.

Oscar Niemeyer

I took this photo of Bia Gremion on a commissioned project, about the identity issues that have surfaced in recent times. I was commissioned to make pictures of fat girls, with this fat as something affirmative and not negative. I did this job and they all used the word 'fat' affirmatively, there were no euphemisms like ‘chubby’, nothing like that. It was ‘fat’ and they claimed to be ‘fat’ against fat phobia. And in the end, I asked them to do nude pictures, if they wanted to. Bia agreed, and I thought it was sexy, interesting and affirmative, there is no shame or anything to hide. I think it is necessary to promote this type of photography nowadays, and to celebrate her beauty as well. For me, it’s very sexy.

Bia Gremion

London. This photo I took in 2012; Leica gave me a monocrome camera, so I could do a test, travel with it and stay with the camera for a while. And it's a camera that only photographs in black and white. And I was in London for a fashion work and also for a series I was doing called Wethem, which had people crossing the street, and I was wandering the streets of London. I woke up early, went to the City, and this idea of a crowd of people, repetition, a certain serialism, always appears in my work in some way, in some of my works. And I thought that this crowd going to work, all the same, dressed in the same way, in black clothes, I think it gave a unity, there was a uniform mass, which attracted me as an image, and all the signs that flow from it.

Londres (London)

This portrait of the great actress and writer Fernanda Torres was made in 1994. And now in 2020 I suffered a huge flood in my studio. And this photo was stored in a map library, randomly, with other photos, I don't know why. It was a big print, 100cmx70cm. And when the flood came down, we started to come into contact with the images deteriorated by the waters. And I saw that they gained another meaning, a materiality, they were reborn in another way. And at the beginning of the year, I made a book about it, called Sub/emerged. So, this photo has the traces of the flood and it became a different image than it was, it has an over-memory, it has the memory of Fernanda Torres' 1994 portrait, and a new memory was molded over that old memory, that was sedimented from the flood.

Sub/emerso (Sub/emerged), Fernanda Torres

To celebrate my 50 years as a photographer, I’m presenting the retrospective (exhibition) “Desnorte” (Adrift). The thematic disorder plays an important part in this show because displaying photographs of different – and perhaps irreconcilable – places, events and themes side by side poses an enormous challenge when one wishes to cover a career spanning decades in a succinct manner. This, of course, wasn’t done by kludging together a random selection of photographs. There is a logic and an order to it: portraits, fashion photographs, polaroids, pictures extracted from my books/exhibitions, pictures taken while traveling or location scouting, photographic annotations, family album pictures, and a number of female nudes made on commission. These images were selected and woven into a patchwork that displays the breadth of my multifaceted photography for this exhibition.	

SP-Foto | Desnorte (Adrift)

Curated by Bob Wolfenson