Time does not repeat itself, thus the urgency to register a moment which will not be visited again. A photograph can give us clues about the relations of those in the picture, allowing us, if we were not present, to fill in the missing details. If we are part of the picture then it becomes memory itself, like the android in the film classic ‘Blade Runner’ who never suspected her origin for she had photographs that matched the implanted memory. The lived experience is fragmented in the moments that are captured by the camera and, as we relive that past moment, we transport it to the present, actualizing it by means of our imagination and complementing it with a narrative to suit our individual and collective needs. It is almost ironic that trains emerged at around the same time as photography, for while the former accelerated the perception of time, the latter strived to capture the passing moment, often resulting in an idealization of the past. We often fall prey to believing, perhaps under the spell of sepia, that the past in not only a foreign country, but a better one. But the past may also be haunting and serve as a critique of the present, for when a photographer chooses an object to be captured as an image, he or she is, by the very act of framing it, making a comment.
Susan Sontag, the author of one of the most important books on photography theory, remarked that people always have an urge to photograph the beautiful, and even when they choose to frame the ugly, it is because they somehow see the beauty in that ugliness. The act of turning an image into a photograph also helps to establish the model of beauty. She goes on to say that another driving force behind people’s choice of subjects is the pursuit of truth, and that those two conflicting ‘imperatives’, to make things beautiful and to show things for what they ‘really’ are, have dominated the story of photography up to present times. In fact, one may be tempted to suggest that one of the most successful Brazilian artists of the last few years, Vik Muniz, tried to bridge the gap between these seemingly dichotomous pursuits by creating huge iconic images out of trash, and then photographing the resulting image. For those who are not familiar with the artist, the documentary about his work, WasteLand, released in 2010, gives a taste of the alchemic element of his approach.
Rubbish is a recurring theme in the audiovisual field in Brazil Rubbish is a recurring theme in the audiovisual field in Brazil: in 1990 Jorge Furtado directed the excellent Ilha das Flores, a thirteen-minute documentary about the destiny of waste produced by a consumer society, while the great master of Brazilian documentary Eduardo Coutinho explored it in Boca de Lixo, (1993), which follows refuse collectors in a huge rubbish dump in Rio de Janeiro.
This tension between photography as document and as art can be witnessed from its very beginning. With the arrival of the daguerreotype in Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the nineteenth century, aspects of Brazilian society were registered by photographers such as Marc Ferrez and Victor Frond, who favoured images of slave work, rural life and landmarks such as the Sugar Loaf Mountain. By the 1940s, the focus on picturesque Brazil gave way to experimental work culminating in the abstract work of those constituting the Grupo Ruptura, and the concretist and neo-concretist movements, though that decade also saw work by photographers such as Pierre Verger, perhaps more concerned with registering that which he saw as both beautiful and true.
The 1960’s and 1970’s witnessed the accession of photojournalism in Brazil, bringing names like Walter Firmo to the fore, and the supremacy of truth over beauty, though the skill of people such as Sebastião Salgado whose framing of misery drew different responses. Salgado photographed refugees in Sudan, undernourished children in Mali, slaughter houses in the U.S., and rubbish dumps in Brazil. But it is exactly his mastery in handling light, and the textural results of his black and white photos, which grant unquestionable beauty to the images and make some of us feel uncomfortable. One of the criticisms levelled at the display of such images in international art galleries is that, removed from its original context, the real exploitation taking place, as in the case of the workers in the mines of Serra Pelada in Brazil, it becomes something else and the image is regarded as a work of art. Nevertheless, these pictures documented a particular time and can be viewed as evidence of the inequalities and injustices of the modern world. More than an image, more than a representation, a photograph displays the actual remains of the light waves reflected by an object, apple of the photographer’s eye, and stands as proof of his or her ‘being there’.
a photograph is, at times, a statement on beauty, at others a statement on truth To conclude, a photograph is, at times, a statement on beauty, at others a statement on truth, and sometimes it is both. It is also a visual record of people, objects and places. I have recently come across a blog of old photographs of a certain area in the city of Rio de Janeiro where the visitor is invited to comment on the images. The virtual exchange between the visitors provides an inventory of a place with little recorded history, weaving connections between people, places and historical transformations. This practice, perhaps unknown to the author of the photoblog, is a recognized methodology in the social sciences named photo elicitation which evokes parallel realities by using photographs as mediators between people. It enables histories to come through voices that are often unheard. Because the photoblog is shared, those histories become collective narratives. Vik Munis, with an artist’s idiosyncratic agenda, depicted the Virgin Mary with bits of trash collected from Jardim Gramacho, one of the largest dumps in the world. Reality, alas, is not framed as a photograph, and rubbish when in its natural habitat, namely abandoned inner city slums of big cities mostly in the global south, is hardly attractive. Crossing these territories, one might question whether it is possible, or morally right, to perform the alchemic act of framing open-air sewage and rubbish in order to produce a piece of art. One cannot help but wonder what stories will be woven by those who inhabit some time in the future and reflect upon the bits of plastic left by the high tides on our beaches. Perhaps, in pursuit of beauty and truth, they will also see that past as a better place, and our world of disposable goods, as treasured remains of a culture long gone.
