A última foto

Uma invenção de virada de século, a fotografia tem sido competente no se reinventar. Contudo, nunca antes ela esteve num estágio mais imprevisível de desenvolvimento, transformação e catarse. A proliferação recente de câmeras digitais em telefones e computadores alterou profundamente a forma como concebemos e identificamos o mundo ao nosso redor. Ironicamente, esses novos e atrativos agentes de produção de imagens são intrinsecamente distantes, produzindo inúmeros snapshots que deslocam a condição popular de objeto da fotografia impressa. E, por sua vez, a imagem digital não apenas é armazenada e vivenciada na privacidade mas também o significado da obra reside em diversos locais, frequentemente vestindo um anonimato que nega qualquer noção de autoria. A fotografia contemporânea e a chegada das tecnologias digitais na América Latina são complicadas, já que a história do meio tem tido, em alguns momentos, uma forte relação com os aspectos literais e associativos de uma realidade distópica (com o cruel absurdo de fotografias serem, algumas vezes, as únicas provas de desaparecimentos em massa sob vários regimes autoritários) em paralelo com experimentalismo inusitado nos anos de 1990 com a (re)construção da imaginário tecnocultural latino-americano. Ambos estão presentes na obra internacionalmente reconhecida da artista brasileira Rosângela Rennó.

Como herdeira desse legado geminado, Rennó tem frequentemente levantado questões sobre a amnésia coletiva e a autoria da produção de imagens na América Latina como meio principal através do qual a autoridade impõe seu poder sobre a sociedade. No passado, ela tem apresentado o tema do desaparecimento, do anonimato (que possuem um significado político particular na América Latina) e do gênero fotográfico recorrente que mostra meninos e homens vestindo uniformes militares – ou de aparência militar – assinalando os valores culturais, sociais e espirituais do acentuado militarismo na América Latina do século XX. (1). Enquanto Rennó descobre modos poderosos, embora inovadores, de apresentar tal produção de imagens encontradas, seus “arquivos universais” são também profundamente altruístas. Principalmente porque tentam persistentemente entender e transmitir experiências marginalizadas e negar equívocos e exclusões nas criações de mitos e histórias oficiais do Brasil.

Para seu trabalho mais recente, Rennó colaborou com 42 fotógrafos para participar na criação da exposição A última foto (soa estranho, mas é fiel ao inglês, mal escrito). Cada fotógrafo escolheu uma câmera da vasta e diversa coleção pessoal da artista para produzir imagens da estátua icônica do Cristo Redentor que paira sobre a cidade do Rio de Janeiro. O ímpeto por trás da escolha desse monumento é conseqüência (de novo, soa estranho, mas é fiel ao inglês, mal escrito) da controvérsia acerca da venda de souvenires associados à estátua e da luta entre a família do escultor franco-polonês Paul Landowski e a Arquidiocese do Rio de Janeiro pelo controle autoral dessa imagem. Questionando controle e autoria, Rennó cobriu de tinta as lentes das câmeras devolvidas e, frequentemente em parceria com o respectivo fotógrafo, selecionou de cada uma das 43 câmeras uma imagem da estátua, incluindo uma tirada por ela mesma. A exposição resultante na Galeria Vermelho em São Paulo apresentou as “últimas” imagens e as máquinas seladas. Os dípticos de câmera e fotografia deixaram claro que a percepção da mesma estátua icônica diferia de fotógrafo para fotógrafo porque câmeras raramente clicam na mesma fração de segundo e, ainda mais revelador, os fotógrafos (ou qualquer observador nesse populoso ponto turístico) podem ver a estátua colossal em momentos e ângulos diferentes, exigindo uma espécie de olhar cinemático.

Para a exposição na Prefix Contemporary Institute of Art, A última foto foi reconstituída através da seleção de 19 dípticos marcando a primeira vez que esse projeto está sendo mostrado fora das fronteiras do Brasil. Recontextualizada de um local para outro, A Última Foto demonstra as ricas conexões entre alinhamentos nacionais e internacionais e deslocamentos que ocorrem inadvertidamente quando a fotografia é testemunhada em um lugar e depois em outro. De maneira pungente, A última foto sugere que mesmo as poucas imagens icônicas (tais como monumentos como o Cristo Redentor) que, uma vez, eram praticamente as únicas imagens turísticas que atravessavam fronteiras e continentes provavelmente têm significados e ressonâncias diferentes porque podem ser apresentadas de formas tão diferentes. Numa definição artística mais expandida de autoria, A última foto examina referencias históricas, narrativas pessoais e experiências vividas através do discurso de ações colaborativas, autoria múltipla e, assim como suturas onde renovações de identidade são trabalhadas examinando pontos de conexão, pontos de identificação temporária, e estratégias de localização que surgem em lugares como o Rio de Janeiro. A exposição inclui trabalhos de Nino Andrés, Thiago Barros, Cris Bierrenbach, Eduardo Brandão, Denise Cathilina, Rochelle Costi, Edouard Fraipont, Iuri Frigoletto, Luiz Garrido, Milton Guran, Ruth Lifschits, Walter Mesquita, Odires Mlászho, Wilton Montenegro, Pedro Motta, Marcelo Tabach, Claudia Tavares, Paula Trope e Rosângela Rennó.

Envolvidos com o passado e o presente, muitos desses artistas atravessam as divisões entre privado/público, estranho/familiar nos espaços sociais que questionam a atual situação do Brasil com a crescente privatização de áreas públicas, áreas segregadas da cidade onde as populações desfavorecidas das favelas se encontram – em áreas aparentemente públicas mas com interesses privados – que frequentemente as excluem. Mistura e heterogeneidade, tanto física como social, são sintomáticas da psique brasileira, e a documentação dos proverbiais “muitos Brasis” por Rochelle Costi é um de seus enunciados mais emblemáticos.(2). O projeto Mercury II de Rochelle Costi, com sua insistência nas proporções harmônicas e na fria distância objetiva, não agencia nenhuma emoção óbvia ou simbolismo aberto, tais como frequentemente encontrados na arquetípica paisagem vernacular brasileira tal como perdura no século XXI. A fotografia, como a maioria das imagens feitas por Costi dos ambientes domésticos brasileiros e suas construções urbanas, é desprovida de tais detalhes como habitantes ou características distinguíveis do território tropical. Isolado de uma paisagem mais ampla, o observador é incumbido de construir um contexto e significado de lugar ao pensar em associações e experiências que transcendem a paisagem e sua geografia local.

Outra visão da natureza movediça da identidade brasileira é demonstrada no trabalho de Milton Guran. Suas fotografias são de espaços democráticos e áreas historicamente públicas – como a rua – nas quais a procissões, paradas e cerimônias são eventos onde pessoas reúnem-se a serviço do pensamento e da ação urbana. No interior desse espaço e tempo, artistas como Guran podem indagar sobre a identidade e memória cívicas do Rio de Janeiro que diz respeito à desconjunção da cidade com relação a um senso coletivo de história. Apesar do drama das paisagens urbanas brasileiras, Paula Trope também se recusa a ficcionar seus sujeitos, mas a distorção desfocada de muitos de seus trabalhos dificulta sua classificação como documental. Inspirada pelo conceitualismo brasileiro, a fotografia de Paula Trope é parte de uma série em curso que retrata meninos pobres, crianças e adolescentes que vivem nas favelas do Rio de Janeiro. Os impactos do conceitualismo brasileiro sobre as formas do Neo-Concretismo, da Tropicália e do Cinema Novo foram profundos e inegáveis na arte e cultura do país – sem falar de esferas mais abrangentes como o sentido de espaço da nação. Ocorreram expressões de nacionalismo aberto, mas vários artistas como Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Miguel Rio Branco e o cineasta Glauber Rocha lançaram propostas mais discretas, frequentemente usando a ótica que reconhecia o poder da mídia e de outros meios tecnológicos – incluindo o ato fotográfico – na construção de ideologia e sistemas de autoridade. Recusando-se a entender o nacionalismo, o internacionalismo estético, o gênero, a raça e a sexualidade como variáveis autônomas de identidade, esses artistas revelaram esses conceitos como fenômenos sobrepostos e, ao fazê-lo, questionaram muitas interpretações convencionais de nacionalidade no Brasil. Seguindo esse exemplo instrutivo de uma prática cultural engajada social e politicamente, Trope frequentemente co-produz seus trabalhos com seus sujeitos (usando câmeras pin-hole feitas com latas), transformando a noção de autor de uma maneira que ultrapassa categorias artísticas. Enquanto esse processo enfatiza a possibilidade de expandir imagens na direção de um território mais relacional, o trabalho de Trope, tal como o de Guran, aponta para o significado do lugar e da vida pública como essenciais não apenas para o entendimento do desenvolvimento urbano brasileiro como também para o fomento de um relacionamento mais vital entre o local e o global, o eu e o outro.

As paisagens de Pedro Motta, Rosângela Rennó e Marcello Tabach podem todas ser consideradas meditações demoradas sobre a presença do passado dentro do presente, e sobre a re-representação da paisagem brasileira. Para muitos dos primeiros fotógrafos, a paisagem européia tornou-se reservatório de significados que euro-brasileiros utilizaram para contar histórias sobre si mesmos, assim definindo-se. Contudo, em meados do século XX, imagens de paisagens precárias de uma Europa destruída pela guerra contrastavam-se vivamente com os contextos iconográficos encontrados em representações populares brasileiras, abalando quaisquer pressuposições da terra como lar ancestral. Impedindo qualquer senso de pertencer para muitos no Brasil e nas Américas, muitos artistas deixaram para trás esses tons imperialistas para refletir sobre o significado de lugar para brasileiros marginalizados ou omitidos de histórias oficiais. (3). Seguindo esse exemplo, artistas como Pedro Motta frequentemente tratam de políticas de paisagem impostas às regiões empobrecidas, radicalmente transformadas por projetos como represas que forçam a relocação das comunidades. Com sua perspectiva aérea, Rennó nos induz uma consciência ainda mais realçada da reconfiguração constante de terra no Rio de Janeiro. Já a justaposição de Tabach – a folhagem do Brasil tropical e o monte do Cristo Redentor – gera uma solenidade estranha, levemente arrebatadora para todo espectador menos insensível – ao ver que estruturas feitas pelo homem – mesmo as mais colossais – são sempre e apenas um fac-símile da natureza.

Muitos desses artistas interessam-se pela solidão que emana de espaços intermediários e não existentes – entre o público e o privado – onde somos todos transeuntes em vez de moradores. As ruas desertas que Thiago Barros fotografa enfatizam estados tanto temporais quanto transitórios das estruturas espaciais e urbanas – uma questão na cultura visual que tem sido familiar e importante por muitas décadas. À luz desse entendimento da experiência de lugar, Ruth Lifschits versa sobre a importância de construções e de espaços como centros de vida pública contemporânea e como lugares potenciais para se reavaliar o significado mutante da cidade. Wilton Montenegro subdividiu sua versão do Cristo Redentor em uma série de imagens, como no rolo de um filme ou num conjunto de memórias que pode ser eternamente configurado e reconfigurado. Como espectadores, nos é oferecida a tarefa prazerosa de nos relacionarmos com cada fotograma antes de ler sinais de estrada, mapas de turista, souvenires e, finalmente, a própria estátua colossal como uma narrativa de temporalidade em movimento, transplante e outras formas de intercâmbio cultural realizadas através de viagens e turismo que frequentemente sacrificam o local e o cultural em favor da falsa prosperidade e da mesmice. Se lermos essas imagens como uma subjetividade que mascara qualquer senso de familiaridade, poderíamos fazer o mesmo com a fotografia de Nino André dos souvenires do Cristo Redentor e com o close-up de Odires Mlászho do rosto da própria estátua, que brincam com a expectativa do que seria uma foto turística. Aqui nos confrontamos com uma face marcada mecanicamente.

O trabalho de Luiz Garrido desloca o espectador do exterior para o interior mapeando o tecido elegante que cobre uma figura nua que segura uma estátua do Cristo Redentor. A obra de Garrido evoca as conexões intimas entre a humanidade e a natureza e contém ressonâncias das tradições da história da arte onde o corpo era representado como espaço topográfico. Assim como outras representações de geografias rurais e urbanas, estudos da forma humana continuam representando nosso desejo inato de compreender o mundo a nossa volta; de olhar além do racional e do visível, de revelar alguma verdade essencial sobre o mundo e nosso espaço nele. Da mesma forma, Denise Cathilina procura na interioridade uma maneira de entender o mundo. Olhando para esse quarto vazio, nos sentimos transportados, nos é oferecido um relance de algo intimo e particular, isso tudo, improvavelmente, em um quarto contendo uma vista para o Cristo Redentor. Em contraste com a imagem de Cathilina, os trabalhos de Cris Bierrenbach, Iuri Frigoletto e Claudia Tavares tomam momentos ou locais específicos e os dissolvem em formas abstratas. Essas encarnações múltiplas nos encorajam a considerar o leque de possibilidades formais e tecnológicas e os meios de representação fotográfica que vão além do simples desejo de registrar as particularidades de um espaço. Isso é levado ainda mais longe com a inclusão do trabalho fantasmagórico de Edouard Fraipont. Frequentemente referindo-se a locais geográficos indeterminados da cidade e do campo, as fotografias fantasmagóricas de Fraipont exploram as tensões entre a modernidade ocidental, a metafísica do ser e imagens profundamente enraizadas em lugares suspensos entre o surreal e o irreal. Permeando essas relações está a crença do artista de que os seres humanos são não apenas ligados ao supernaturalismo, mas um aspecto dele.

Finalmente, como um complemento/contrate com os artistas acima, representando uma estratégia histórica ao invés de uma sobre possibilidade ilusória e fictícia, está o trabalho do paulistano Eduardo Brandão. Aqui, nos confrontamos com a reconfiguração do fotógrafo individualizado, agora com uma câmera digital, mantendo seu aspecto tipicamente histórico como aparato de documentação e registro. A obra aparece como uma memória direta e literal das ambições tecno-políticas às quais o fotógrafo, como autor individual, se agarrava. Ao fazê-lo, Brandão anuncia o desaparecimento do fotógrafo com gênio criativo solitário com o advento do anonimato digital a da reconfiguração da fotografia como instrumento do amador. O derradeiro território de A Última Foto não é o testemunho da documentação do Cristo Redentor, mas sim o recontar evocativo do desenvolvimento, transformação e catarse da fotografia; como tal, situa Rosângela Rennó e seus contemporâneos entre os fotógrafos mais radicais dos dias de hoje.

1. Entre 1955 e 1985, dez grandes países da América do Sul estiveram sob regime militar, incluindo o Brasil, onde os regimes autoritários não apenas aboliram as liberdades democráticas, mas também institucionalizaram a tortura e orquestraram o desaparecimento de milhares de pessoas. Artistas vivenciaram o autoritarismo, em suas formas materiais e psicológicas, como exilados internos ou externos. Não é de surpreender que a fotografia, usada a serviço das ditaduras militares, resistiu ser vista de acordo com noções tradicionais de autoria. As autoridades enfatizaram a natureza objetiva do meio, seu escoramento nas evidências e sua dependência nos modos analógicos de representação como prova de suas qualidades não autorais.
2. O termo “muitos Brasis” ou “dois Brasis” é um refrão comum. Ele é usado aqui para designar tipos específicos de espaço social, habitados pelos poucos privilegiados e pelos muitos em desvantagem, constituídos por uma miscelânea de rupturas, conexões, desejo de retorno, negação do passado, novas oportunidades, renegociação da identidade, e reconhecimento.
3. A antítese entre natureza e humanidade tornou-se um assunto de interesse no Brasil na última década. Alguns autores que exploram esse fenômeno cultural incluem, Marilena Chauí (Brasil: mito fundador e sociedade autoritária, São Paulo: Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2000), e Renato Janine Ribeiro (A sociedade contra o social – o alto custo da vida pública no Brasil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000).

MATHESON, Elizabeth; DOBRANSZKY, Diana. A última foto. Ensaio escrito em 2007 para a exposição The Last Photograph, Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canadá, maio-junho de 2008. Studium, Campinas, SP, n. 27, p. 132–142, 2008. DOI: 10.20396/studium.v0i27.12351. Disponível em: https://econtents.bc.unicamp.br/inpec/index.php/studium/article/view/12351.

A turn of the century invention, the camera has been adept at reinventing itself. Yet, never before has the photograph been at a more unpredictable stage of development, transformation and catharsis. The recent proliferation of digital cameras into phones and computers have profoundly altered the way we conceive of and identify the world around us. Ironically, these new enticing agents of image making are intrinsically detached producing innumerable snapshots displacing the popular object hood of the print photograph. And by turn, not only is digital imagery downloadable and experienced privately but the meaning of the work resides in a multitude of sites often cloaked in anonymity belying any sense of authorship. Contemporary photography and the advent of digital technologies in Latin America is somewhat complicated, as the history of the medium has had at times a strong relationship to the literal and associative aspects of a dystopian reality (with the cruel absurdity of photographs being sometimes the only proof of mass disappearances under various authoritarian regimes) alongside unprecedented experimentalism in the 1990’s with the (re)construction of Latin American technocultural imagery. Both are present in the work of internationally renowned Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó.

As an inheritor of this twinned legacy, Rennó has often posed questions about the collective amnesia and authorship of image making in Latin America as a primary means by which authority imposes its power on society. In the past, she has presented the theme of disappearance and the anonymous (which has a particular political significance in Latin America) and the recurring photographic genre of boys and men dressed in military or military-like uniform signifying the cultural, social and spiritual values of heightened militarism in twentieth century Latin America. (1) While Rennó discovers powerful, albeit innovative modes of presenting such found imagery, her “universal archives” are also deeply altruistic, mostly because they persistently endeavor to understand and convey marginalized experiences and counter inaccuracies and exclusions in Brazil’s mythmaking and official histories.

For her newest work, Rennó collaborated with forty-two photographers to participate in the creation of the exhibition A última foto (The last photo). Each photographer chose a camera from the artist’s vast and diverse personal collection to produce images of the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue that towers above the city of Rio de Janeiro. The impetus for choosing this monument was due to the controversy of the sale of souvenirs associated with Christ the Redeemer and the struggle for copyright control of its image between the family of the French-Polish sculptor Paul Landowski and the Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro.Questioning control and authorship, Rennó painted ink on the returned camera lenses and often along with the respective artist selected one image of the statue from each of the forty-three cameras including an image taken by Rennó herself. The resulting exhibition at Galeria Vermelho in São Paulo displayed the "last" images along with the sealed cameras. The camera and photograph diptychs made it clear that the perception of the same iconic statue differed from photographer to photographer because cameras seldom click at the same fraction of a second, and, even more tellingly, the photographers (or any other observer at this heavily populated tourist site) may see the colossal statue at different times and angles demanding a sort of cinematic mode of looking.

For the exhibition at Prefix Contemporary Institute of Art, A última foto has been reconstituted through the selection of nineteen diptychs marking the first time this project has been exhibited outside of Brazil’s borders. Recontextualized from one locale to another, A última foto demonstrates the rich connections between national and international alignments and displacements that unwittingly occur when the photograph is witnessed in one place and then another. Poignantly, A última foto suggests that even the few iconic images (such as monuments like Christ the Redeemer) that once were virtually the only familiar touristic imagery shared across borders and continents probably have different meanings and resonances because they can be presented in such different ways. In a more expanded art definition of authorship, A última fotoexamines historical references, personal narratives and lived experiences through the discourse of collaborative actions, multiple authorship, and as well as sutures where identity renewals are worked through points of attachment, points of temporary identification, and place-making strategies emerging in places such as Rio de Janeiro. Works in the exhibition, include examples by Nino Andrés, Thiago Barros, Cris Bierrenbach, Eduardo Brandão, Denise Cathilina, Rochelle Costi, Edouard Fraipont, Iuri Frigoletto, Luiz Garrido, Milton Guran, Ruth Lifschits, Walter Mesquita, Odires Mlászho, Wilton Montenegro, Pedro Motta, Marcelo Tabach, Claudia Tavares, Paula Trope, and Rosângela Rennó.

Engaged with the past and present, many of these artists bridge the divisions between private/public, strange/familiar in social spaces that question Brazil’s current situation with increasingly privatized public areas, segregated areas of the city where disadvantaged favela populations meet – in seemingly public areas with private interests - that often excludes them. Mixture and heterogeneity, both physically and socially, is symptomatic of the Brazilian psyche, and Rochelle Costi’s documentation of the proverbial “many Brazils” are among its most emblematic statements. (2) For this project Rochelle Costi’s Mercury II, with its insistence on harmonious proportions and a cool objective distance, does not peddle any obvious emotional sentiment or overt symbolism often found in the Brazil ‘s archetypal vernacular landscape as it persists in the 21st century. The photograph, like most of Costi’s images of many Brazils’ domestic settings and urban buildings, is bereft of such details as inhabitants or distinctive features of the surrounding tropical terrain. Isolated from the broader landscape, the viewer is left to construct a context and significance of place meaning by thinking about associations and experiences that transcend landscape and its local geography.

Another take on the shifting nature of Brazilian identity is outlined in the work of Milton Guran. Guran photographs democratic spaces and historically public areas – such as the street – in which processions, parades and ceremonies are often events where people come together in the service of urban thought and action. Within this space and time, artists such as Guran can ask questions about Rio de Janeiro’s civic identity and memory that speaks to the city’s disjuncture with a collective sense of history. Despite the drama of Brazilian cityscapes, Paula Trope also refuses to fictionalize her subject, but the blurred distortion of many of her works makes it difficult to describe as documentary. Inspired by Brazilian Conceptualism, Paula Trope’s photography is part of an ongoing series that depict impoverished meninos, children and adolescents who live in the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. The effects of Brazilian Conceptualism in the forms of Neo-Concretism, Tropicália and Cinema Novo were profound and undeniable in Brazilian art and culture – not to mention the extended realms of place meaning for the nation. While overt expressions of nationalism occurred, many artists such as Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Miguel Rio Branco and the filmmaker Glauber Rocha embarked on more discreet propositions often using the lens that recognized the power of media and other technological mediums – even in the taking of a photograph – in the construction of ideology and systems of authority. Refusing to perceive nationalism, aesthetic internationalism, gender, race and sexuality as autonomous variables of identity, these artists revealed them to be overlapping phenomena and, in doing so, challenged many conventional interpretations of nationhood in Brazil. Following in this instructive example of a socially and politically engaged cultural practice, Trope often co-produces her work with her subjects (using pin-hole cameras made from tin cans), transforming the notion of author in ways that supersede artistic boundaries. While its process highlights the possibility of expanding images into more relational territory, Trope’s work, much like Guran’s, calls attention to the meaning of place and public life as essential not only to understanding Brazilian urban development but a fostering of a more vital relationship between local and global, self and other.

Pedro Motta’s, Rosângela Rennó’s and Marcello Tabach’s landscapes can all be considered sustained meditations on the presence of the past in the present, and the re-representation of the Brazilian landscape. For many early photographers, the landscape of Europe became a reservoir of meanings which Euro-Brazilians drew upon to tell stories about and thereby define themselves. Yet by the mid twentieth century, images of a precarious landscape in war-torn Europe stood in stark contrast to the iconographic settings often found in popular Brazilian representations jarring any assumptions of the land as an ancestral homeland. Precluding any sense of belonging for many in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas, many artists moved beyond these imperialist tones to reflect upon the meaning of place for Brazilians who are marginalized or omitted from official histories. (3). Following in this example, artists such as Pedro Motta often considers imposed landscape politics on impoverished regions being radically transformed by projects such as dams that force communities to relocate. With her aerial perspective, Rennó makes us feel even a more heightened awareness of Rio de Janeiro’s continually re-shaping of the land. While Tabach’s pairing – the foliage of tropical Brazil and the mount of Christ the Redeemer – creates an odd solemnity, tinged with wonder even in all but the most disaffected viewer – to see that human-made structures – even the most colossal - are always and only a facsimile of nature.

Many of the artists here are interested in the solitude that emanates from intermediate and non-places – between the private and public – which we are all passers-by rather than inhabitants. The deserted streets that Thiago Barros photographs stresses both temporal and transitory states of urban structures and space - an issue in visual culture that has been a familiar and important one for several decades. In light of this understanding of place experience, Ruth Lifschits touches upon the importance of buildings and spaces as loci of contemporary public life and as potential sites with which to re-evaluate the changing meaning of the city. Wilton Montenegro broke his version of Christ the Redeemer down into a series of images like a film reel or a recollection of memories that might be endlessly configured and reconfigured. As viewers, we are offered the pleasurable task of engaging with each frame before reading roadside signposts, tourist maps, souvenirs and finally the colossal statue itself as a moving narrative of temporality, transplantation and other kinds of cultural exchange through travel and tourism that often sacrifices the local and the cultural in favour of false prosperity and sameness. If we read these images as a subjective that belies any sense of familiarity, we could do the same with Nino Andrés’ photograph of Christ the Redeemer souvenirs and Odires Mlászho’s close up shot of the actual statue’s visage that poke fun at the viewer’s expectation of the tourist snapshot. Here we are confronted with a mechanically marked face.

Luiz Garrido’s work moves the viewer from the exterior to interior by mapping the elegant drapery covering a nude figure holding a statue of Christ the Redeemer. Garrido’s work is evocative of the intimate connections between humanity and nature and resonates with art historical traditions in which the body was depicted as a topographical place. Much like the other representations of rural and urban geographies, studies of the human form continue to represent our innate desire to comprehend the world around us; to look beyond the rational and the visible, to reveal some essential truth about the world and our place in it. Denise Cathilina likewise draws on interiority as a way to understand the world. Looking into this empty room, one feels transported, offered a glimpse of something intimate and particular in, of all places, a room with a view of Christ the Redeemer. In contrast to Cathilina’s image, other works by Cris Bierrenbach, Iuri Frigoletto and Claudia Tavares in this exhibition take specific moments or locales and dissolve them into abstract forms. These multiple incarnations encourage us to consider the array of formal and technological possibilities and means of photographic representation that go beyond the simple desire to record the particulars of a place. This is taken further by the inclusion of the phantasmagoric work of Edouard Fraipont. Often referencing indeterminate geographic locations of urbanity and land, Fraipont’s’ phantasmagoric photographs explore tensions between western modernity, metaphysics of being, and imagery that is deeply rooted in places that are suspended between the surreal and unreal. Underlying these relationships, is the artist’s belief that humans are not merely connected with supernaturalism but an aspect of it.

Finally, as a complement/contrast to the artists’ work above, representing a historical strategy rather than one of illusory and fictitious possibility is the work of paulistano Eduardo Brandão. Here, we are confronted with a reconfiguration of the individuated photographer, holding now a digital camera continuing the historically typical aspects of the camera as a device of documentation and recording. The work figures as a direct and literal memory of the techno-political ambitions to which the photographer as individual author once clung. In doing so, Brandão heralds the disappearance of the photographer as the lone creative genius with the advent of digital anonymity and the reinscription of photography as a tool of the amateur. The ultimate siting of A última foto (The last photo) is not in witnessing the documentation of Christ the Redeemer but in its evocative re-telling of the development, transformation and catharsis of photography and as such presents Rosângela Rennó and her contemporaries as some of the most radical photographers working today.

1. Between 1955 and 1985, ten major countries in South America fell under military rule including Brazil, where authoritarian regimes not only abolished democratic freedoms but also institutionalized torture and orchestrated the disappearances of thousands of peoples. Artists experienced authoritarianism, in its psychological and material forms, either as internal or external exiles. Not surprisingly, photography in the service of military dictatorships resisted being thought of in terms of traditional notions of authorship. Authorities emphasized the objective nature of the medium, its evidential underpinnings and its reliance on analogic modes of representation as evidence of its unauthored qualities.

2. The term “many Brazils” or “two Brazils” is a common refrain. It is used here to refer to particular kinds of social space inhabited by the privileged few and the disadvantaged many constituted by a mix of ruptures, connections, yearning to return, denial of the past, new opportunities, identity renegotiation, and recognition.

3. The antithesis between nature and humanity has become a topic of interest in Brazil over the last decade. Some authors who explore this cultural phenomenon include, Marilena Chauí (Brasil: mito fundador e sociedade autoritária, São Paulo: Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2000), and Renato Janine Ribeiro (A sociedade contra o social – o alto custo da vida pública no Brasil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000).

MATHESON, Elizabeth; DOBRANSZKY, Diana. The Last Photo. Essay written in 2007 or the show The Last Photograph, Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada, May-June 2008. Studium, Campinas, SP, n. 27, p. 132–142, 2008. DOI: 10.20396/studium.v0i27.12351. Avaiable in: https://econtents.bc.unicamp.br/inpec/index.php/studium/article/view/12351.

A desaparição da fotografia, ou porque não paramos mais de fotografar

The Disappearance of Photography, or Why We Don’t Stop Taking Pictures

Textos relacionados ao trabalho

a última foto

Texts linked to the work The Last Photo

Hoje podemos falar de uma desaparição da fotografia. Trata-se de uma desaparição paradoxal, de algo que justamente foi criado para registrar o que potencialmente logo desaparece. A fotografia em papel guardava uma presença, uma densidade que foi e é muito explorada pelas artes plásticas. As potencialidades artísticas da fotografia analógica certamente nunca foram tão exploradas antes da fase de sua desaparição. É como se, diante de seu fim, a fotografa analógica se tornasse ainda mais eloqüente como uma metáfora ambígua de nossa memória, que é sempre inscrição da presença e de seu apagamento. Decerto já possuímos muitas grandes obras de arte na base digital, mas o princípio da fotografia analógica ainda deverá produzir muitas grandes obras também.

Muitos elementos da fotografia tradicional são abalados, em menor ou maior escala, pela foto digital. Por exemplo, a questão dos direitos autorais. Sabemos como este tema já era complicado na era da fotografia analógica. Mas, com o tempo, desenvolveram-se procedimentos de garantia de respeito à autoria das imagens. Com a fotografia digital, que só pode ser compreendida com a paralela abertura do universo da web, esta questão ganhou uma dimensão inaudita. Além da facilidade de manipulação e de multiplicação das imagens, a incrível capacidade de circulação delas acrescenta mais uma dificuldade para se controlar os direitos autorais. Na era digital a autoridade do fotógrafo é posta em questão. Esta autoridade também é abalada pela fantástica democratização dos aparelhos fotográficos. Todos agora somos fotógrafos, e com isso se indica não apenas que somos agentes da fotografia enquanto manipuladores e agentes na sua circulação: todos atuamos na própria captação das imagens. Uma criança de cinco anos já possui hoje sua primeira câmara digital. Além disso, a câmara digital, na medida em que nos possibilita um acesso imediato às imagens capturadas e como não depende de sua tradução para um meio duro, propicia uma multiplicação do próprio ato de captura de imagens. É uma banalidade afirmar que fotografamos muito mais na era digital. Se esta multiplicação quantitativa significa uma elevação qualitativa é uma questão ainda a ser respondida. Esta multiplicação quantitativa pode ser explicada não só pela facilidade técnica, mas também por uma necessidade quase que patológica do indivíduo contemporâneo de registrar tudo em imagens. “Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion)”, escreveu Baudelaire. Estas palavras caracterizam também o indivíduo contemporâneo com sua sede de construir uma casa em um mundo onde tudo se liquefaz. Como suas imagens também são líquidas ele não pára de inscrevê-las. Nossa era de museus e de arquivos é uma filha de nosso descolamento com a tradição e, mais recentemente, de nossa crise dos limites do próprio humano.

O projeto de Rosangela Rennó, A última foto, propõe um diálogo crítico com essa passagem da era analógica para a digital. A idéia de convidar 43 fotógrafos para fotografar o Cristo Redentor no Rio de Janeiro pode ser interpretada como um verdadeiro ritual de despedida da foto analógica. Esta poderá até se perpetuar, como também muitos ainda hoje preferem escrever em antigas máquinas de escrever. Mas é claro que a virada digital já ocorreu. A exposição, por sua vez, reúne essas fotos ao lado das câmaras que as captaram, formando dípticos, como descreve Rosangela. A câmara já se apresenta assim como peça de museu. O fato do objeto escolhido ser um monumento é digno de nota. A fotografia analógica manifesta assim um desejo de eternidade, diante da ameaça nascida da fotografia digital. Esta, no entanto, “fagocitará” com tranqüilidade as fotos analógicas da exposição, assim como os seus textos. A revolução digital incorpora o passado no seu presente perene, no tempo-lugar da web, onde, para o bem e para o mal, não sabemos mais diferenciar o virtual do real.

SELIGMANN-SILVA, Márcio. A desaparição da fotografia, ou porque não paramos mais de fotografar. In A Última Foto. Catálogo da exposição, 2006, pp. 77-79

Today we can talk about the disappearance of photography. It is a paradoxical disappearance of something that was created exactly to register what will potentially soon disappear. Paper photography maintained a presence, a density that was extremely exploited by the visual arts. The artistic possibilities of analog photography were certainly never as explored as before the phase of its disappearance. It is as if, in light of its death, analog photography has become even more eloquent as an ambiguous metaphor of our memory, which is always an inscription of the present and of its erasure. Although we already possess many great works of art in digital format, analog photography will also continue to produce great art.

To a greater or lesser degree, digital photography has disrupted many other elements of traditional photography, such as the issue of copyright. We know how complicated this already was in the analog era. However, over time, procedures were developed to guarantee respect for image authorship. With digital photography, which can only be understood together with the appearance of the Web universe, this issue gained unprecedented dimension. In addition to the easy manipulation and the multiplication of images, their incredible ability to circulate makes controlling copyright even more difficult. In the digital era the authority of the photographer is put into question. This authority has also been shaken by the fantastic democratization of photographic cameras. We are all photographers now, meaning that we are not only agents of photography, but manipulators and agents of photo circulation; we all capture images. Today, a five-year-old child already owns his own digital camera. Furthermore, because the digital camera offers instant access to the captured images and is not dependent on their hard-copy translation, it multiplies the act of capturing images. It is commonplace to affirm that we take many more photos in the digital era. Whether this quantitative multiplication signifies an increase in quality is a question that has yet to be answered. This quantitative multiplication can be explained not only by its technical ease, but also by the almost pathological need of contemporary individuals to register everything in images. Baudelaire wrote, Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion). These words also describe the contemporary individual and his thirst for building a house in a world where everything dissolves. Since his images are also liquid, he cannot stop inscribing them. Our era of museums and archives is the child of our rupture with tradition, and more recently, of the crisis of the limits of what is human.

Rosangela Rennó’s project, The Last Photograph, proposes a critical dialogue with this passage from the analog to the digital era. The idea of inviting 43 photographers to photograph the Christ the Redeemer statue can be interpreted as a genuine farewell ritual to the analog photo. This era might self-perpetuating, in the same way that many people still prefer to write on old typewriters, even though the digital revolution has already happened. The exhibit brings together the photos alongside the cameras that captured them, forming diptychs, as Rosângela calls them. In doing so, the camera already becomes a museum piece. It is worth noting that the chosen object has been granted monumental status. In doing so, analog photography, threatened by its digital counterpart, reveals a desire for eternity. However, digital photography will calmly “devour” both the exhibit’s analog photos as well as its texts. The digital revolution incorporates the past in its perennial present, in the time-space of the Web, where, for better or worse, we can no longer differentiate the virtual from the real.

SELIGMANN-SILVA, Márcio. The Disappearance of Photography, or Why We Don’t Stop Taking Pictures. In A Última Foto. Exhibition catalogue., 2006, pp. 99-100.

A beautiful death: On Rosângela Rennó’s Última Foto

Textos relacionados ao trabalho

a última foto

Texts linked to the work The Last Photo

It is true that photography as such will not die as a result of the conversion from analog or chemical photography to digital imagery, for in fact photography (or at least, “the photographic” (1) has along history been both an agent and an object of modernization, and has gone through a significant number of technological revolutions that have redefined its practice and social implications. However, it would be mistaken to deny the truth of our feeling of loss for the film and the optical camera, the experience of developing with chemical fluids and the referent of the negative. If we stop to consider it for a moment, the traditional cameara is in the single technological gadget that we have truly mourned with the end of the 20th century. Nobody seems to shed tears for the passing of the typewriter, the demise of the magnetic tape, or the possible obsolescence of filament bulbs. Certainly we fear the possible substitution of books printed on paper for the evanescent characters floating on a screen, and a segment of the market has made every possible effort to keep alive vynil as a specialized musical record for connoisseurs and discjokeys. Despite quickly joining the race for increasingly more powerful digital cameras, with more and more megapixels, there seems to be a honest lament for the death of photographic culture or the institution. Even for those who argue for the continuity of photography across its different technological regimes the collapse of the classical technologies of the camera and film suggest a turnover of of our concept of photography. Or to be precise, as Geoffrey Batchen rightly argued back in 1999, with the end of the classical photographic devices we suffered both an intellectual and libidinal crisis:

In any case, even if we continue to identify photography with certain archaic technologies, such as camera and film, those technologies are themselves the embodiment of the idea of photography, or, more accurately, of a persistent economy of photographic desires and concepts. (2)

On the one hand, to be sure, the birth of analogic imagining produced an epistemological conondrum: the advent of what W. J. Mitchell calls the “age of electrobricollage”where the divide between artistic creation and objective indexical record has broken down, and creating photographic looking images without recourse to the camera had become possible. By becoming an art of depiction and invention instead of objective record, a matter of rigurous technical skill rather than of a certain control on the contingent, photography would have infected itself of same disease had brought up the death of painting, a loss in general cultural authority. (3) But along with becoming just another means of visual producing rather than the purveyor of visual truth, photography has also lost its allure value. Without a material support due to its de-materialization, deprived of the expectation harbored through the time the image was merely “latent” on the photosensitive emulsion on film, perpetually indetermined in terms of size, contrast, and even colour due to the versatility of computer postproduction, banalized because of its availability, the photographic object is not anymore a priceless unique marvel that carries on a piece of paper or a silver plate a glimpse of what is distant. Circulating through the internet or projected on the ghostly appearance of the screen like a TV or cinema apparition, a digital photograph can not be owned and treasured. Pure information does not rise to the level of provoking fetishism.

Rosângela Rennó was not prompted to devise The last photograph due to the abstract threat of the takeover of the digital revolution but because of a sudden economic turn: the commercial decision of large photographic corporations to accelerate the demise of traditional photography and embrace the change of media. The industrial transition was, indeed, a matter of the production of artificial obsolescence: by stopping the production of photographic paper, multinational companies brought analog photography to an end in terms of the mass market playing their bets at the gains coming from the sudden technological reconversion. Embeded obsolescence is, of course, a major signature of the new economy of photographic desires and concepts.

Humanity and the mechanism

Rennó’s Last photo series is a constant reminder of the importance that the specificity of the negative and the camera had in our the first two centuries of mechanically reproduced images. In fact, one of the most moving aspects of the whole project is the way Rennó makes us aware of the different sensibility involved in the visual behaviour of each camera, and the importance that the format and color temperate of each kind of film had in the character of photographs. One could say, in fact, that if Rennó chose to display this work as a series of dyptichs involving both an enlargement of the last photograph produced by a photographer in Rio de Janeiro, and the cancelled camera used in each take, it was to emphasize the kinship between the mechanical device and the qualities of the image, to highlight the textures and effects that are bound to be irretrievably lost with the arrival of the pixelated record.

Each of the 43 sets in the series is, in fact, a demonstration of the “personality” granted to a certain combination of camera and film: the grain and colour of a 110 film minolta, with its shadowy average focus, will never compare with the speed and intrusiveness of a 1980s Canon AE1, or the richness of hues and tones of a panoramic made with a 35 mm Ricoh. Certainly her project involves a cross cut of carioca photographers, a review of the visual imagination and the understanding of the local identity of photojournalists, commercial practitioners and artists. Nonetheless Rossângela Rennó has granted the camera bodies she collected, repaired and handed in to her collaborators, a starring role that is validated in their exhibition along the images, like museum specifimens. Those cameras appear as corpses of a bygone cultural and industrial era, where the finest clockmaking craftmanship and miniature electronics allowed us a maximum control of the exposure of extremely photosensitive material.

Rennó’s consideration for the historical meaning of this cameras (some of them proud Brazilian examples that pay hommage to the attempt of the periphery of building an independent industrial power) is by no means excesive. These instruments are major carriers of aesthetic and social values, deeply involved in the affective significance of photography. In this the market and the high brow photographers used to agree: camera formats and film involved different forms of perception (4). There was always a certain fetishism around the camera brands: they provided an object of identification, if not a part of our body and seses, that practically fused with the name and legend of the photographer. After discovering the Leica in Marseille, Henri Cartier-Bresson came to describe it as an “the extension of my eye”, and thus turned into a prosthesis of his own body he was never to depart from it (5). In the same manner, kept on promising the amateur that the increasingly automatic mechanisms would be so integrated to them that they would practically fuse with him, an idea that found its perfect embodyment in Andres Feininger’s portrait of the Photojournalist (c. 1955) whee the two eyes of the photographer are substituted by the lens and viewfinder of a Leica, transforming the camera into an industrial mas. But such fantasy was also pervasive among the popular fantasies of the medium. Minolta ads in the 1970s extolled “you are the camera and the camera is you” (6), whereas Zen philosopher of the camera, Robert Leverant , would practically argue that the photographic camera was the passage between the interior and exterior self aimed to restablish our mystical relationship with the universe.

The traditional camera itself involved a way of seeing that can’t be just as easily discarded with the arrival of the uniform standards towards which digital cameras strive. The differences of optics, contrast and temperature are not a matter of aesthetic decision or the photographer’s “style.” They depended on the “body” of the camera, and the chemical nature of each film. They were characteristics related to the material conditions of each instrument, that soon will stop being part of our experience of the world to become a purely technical expertise of museum curators and restorers. Very much like the different textures and shades produced by different etching techniques, the demise of the negative will make the appreciation of different films and camera eyes an esoteric and archaeological knowledge.

A better afterlife

One of the most sentimental elements of the experience of modernity lies in the fact that once a technology becomes obsolete it gives way its innermost humanity. What once proudly appeared as a supernatural being invested with powers well beyond the intellectual powers of the layman, finally renders itself as a product of ingenuity and labour, which even seems touched with the illusions and sufferings of its former owners (7). Worn out, in this case, means emotionally charged. When it becomes part of history every technological marvel mutates into an example of kitchen science. At the same time the machine frees its ghost, and therefore suggests the sensibility of its maker.

This is the reason why old cameras appear as emotionally charged as a the face full of wrinkles of an old gentleman or lady, to the point that even the smell of machine oil is able to trigger a sense of distinction. This general phenomenon is particularly poignant in the case of cameras because one of the main tasks of photographic records is to provide of material for the future longing for everyone’s “better” past. In any case, an old camera (very much as an ancient typewriter) become a double witness of a bygone utopia. Every camera collection is, in that sense, a collection of dead eyes.

Useful clichés to remember

To photograph the Christ of Corcovado in Rio is to fell pry of a cliché. With hindsight it is possible to see to which extent A ultima photo involves a witty game with stereotypes. First, of course, that apart of England and France, Brazil is one of the mythical birthcraddles of the art of fixing shadows: it is well known that Antoine Hércules Romuald Florence was the isolate inventor of photography in Brazil, and the first to coin the term “photography” in 1824, a decade before John Herschel (8). It is more than fitting that one should also record photography’s brazilian death. Besides, there is the country stereotype, Stefan Zweig fixed in the title of his book of 1941: Brazilland of the future (9). It is not entirely without irony that photography that was, both, one of the most important agents of modernization and a witness of the crimes of modernization, would finally end trampled under the feet of modernity. Finally, there is the simple issue that each photograph, as the result of an endlessly reproductible negative, was a cliché of sorts. I do not know if it is still correct to call digital images clichés as well.

The death of a metaphore

It is through the obsolescence of language that we are forced to notice the collapse of a cultural setting, for worldviews fell apart when words become meaningless and empty. I had a glimpse of such an experience a few months ago, when teaching an introductory class in the art history masters in Mexico city with very young students, most of them born in the 1980s. I was discussing the relationship between modern and contemporary artworks and the social system aludying to the metaphor of “the negative” when I felt an uncomfortable silence. I had the slightly paranoid feeling that at least some of my listeners were unable to follow my reasoning. I tried to bridge the misunderstanding, explaining them the way photographs were taken in the analog era: the mistery of the latent image, the excitement of the magical development of a print under the red glow of the safety light, the wealth of information lying in the microscopic details of a take, which is implicit in the concept of the optical unconscious. In short, I made sure that at least this group, who came to age with the new century, will be able to understand Blow up’s critical importance. But deep inside I had a feeling of having witnessed a catastrophe, the end of an important part of my own world. I felt melancholic and lonely like the day I read amongst the text labels of an exhibition of Mexican engraver Leopoldo Mendez, a couple of entries to explain the viewers what “socialism” and “communism” meant.

Of course I ought to have known that Museums were ossaries of nightmares and dreams. I could not help thinking that there ought to be a kinship between certain forms of mass reproduction and forms of social imagination. To which extent modernity´s utopianism, as long as its distrust on appearances, contained the experience of the dark ghostly shadows formed in the surface of glass or film and their peculiar oppositional semblance to appearances? How could notions such as the “dialectical image” or “negative dialectics” could survive the oblivion of such a powerful referent of the inversion of our perceptions?

It is probably to be expected that that the demise of classical chemical/analogic photography will bring cultural challenges well beyond the unceratinty around the truth value of digital image production, the crisis of the photographic index and the blurring of the virtual and the documentary. The texture of a way of experiencing the world and our memories is being transformed for the sake of a new industrial standard that does away with the concept of a fixed shadow or materialized memory, simply because digital information is entirely indifferent to the nature of its carrier. It is not only that the digital image does not seem to be affected by entropy, as long as we keep on migrating a file from one computer to the other. Digital information is not anymore inscribed in any recognizable surface. What would it mean to think the world without the awareness of the materiality of the recording implied in the scratches on LPs and shapshots, and the cracks of oil paintings?

Last sight

It does not really matter if it was Rosângela Renno’s intention or if it was simply an unconconscious side-effect of the atempt to stage the death of photographic medium: each of the cameras Renno lent to Rio de Janeiro photographers to memorialize the passing of analog image making experienced a merciful last rite of sorts. When commissioning 43 professional photographers to portray the Christ the Redeemer of Corcovado (1931) Rennó did not only signalled the paradoxical status of an image that is both the symbol of a city and visual commodity whose control is still disputed between the Cathoclic Archidiocese of Rio and the heirs of french sculpture Paul Landowski (10). Beyond pointing out the untenable copyright claims around a public monument that is practically impossible not to get into frame of if taking a snapshot from any point in the city, Rennó made each photographer perform some sort of last rite. That each of this mechanical-optical devices has been made to see the effigy of Christ for the last time, before being blinded for ever covering with silver paint the inside of its lens puts in practice the ideal of a romantic death (11) where the person dying fixes his or her glance in a crucifix in advance of the delights of sharing eternal life with the redeemer. It is as if the Corcovado himself would be revalidating the promise made to the good malefactor from the top of the cross: “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise”(12). Condemned to regress to become a mere camera obscura, displaced by a new form of reproduction, Renno’s cameras are resucitated just once to lay afterward like dead cold fish, their eyes clouded by a silver barrier, one-eyed monsters put to sleep under the vague hope of becoming at least objects of contemplation.

1. This distinction between photography and “the photographic” is a significant element of the discourses about digital photography: “The digital image ahhinilates photography wile solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.” (Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography”in: Liz Wells ed. The Photography Reader, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, p.241. Available online: http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital_photo.html) “Insofar as digital images reproduce the characteristic features of an image made with a lens and a film plane (and most do), they remain photographic”. See alsoSteve Edwards, Photography. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p.136-137).
  2. Geoffrey Batchen, “Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age”, in: Carol Squiers, ed., Over Exposed.Essays on Contemporary Photograpy. New York, The New Press, 1999, p. 19.
  3.   William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge, Mass.-London, England, The MIT Press, 1992, p. 6-7, 16, 20.
4.   There is no question that a 4x5 or 8x10 view camera calls for a diferent kind of ‘seeing’ than a hand-held 35mm camera. Ideally, a photographer develops apersonal style and works with a camera format that complements it. But a photographer who uses several camera types will often find that his very perception changes when he is carrying a small camera instead of a large one, and viceversa.
  5.   Henri Cartier-Bresson, in: Susan Sontag, On Photography, Sixth Printing, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1978. p. 185.
  6.    Ibid. p. 186.
  7.   The traditional photographic image once represented the inhuman, devilish objectivity f technological vision. Today, however, it looks so human, so familiar, so domesticated - in contrat to the alienating, still unfamiliar appearance of a computer display with its 1280 by 1024 resolution, 32 bits per pixel, 16 million colors, and so on.” Lev Manovich, Op. cit, p. 242.
  8.   That Hércules Florence’s story has become standard in the introductory books on photography is a significant step in the change of our cultural genealogies. (see: Eduards, op cit., p. 72, 78.
  9.   The title of Zweig’s hopeful view of Brazil of 1941, written under the hopeless conviction that Europe would soon fall completely into the hands of the Nazis. (Stephan Zweigh, Brazil land of the future, New York, Viking Press, 1941, p. 4.
  10.   Fabio Cypriano, “In the name of the Father. Monument turns 75 with parternity still under discussion”, in: Rosângela Rennó, A última foto, Sao Paulo, Galeria Vermelho, 2006, p. 83-84.
  11.   See: Philippe Ariès, El hombre ante la muerte, trad. Mauro Armiño, Madrid, Taurus, 1983, p. 358.
  12.   Luke, 23:43.

MEDINA, Cuauhtémoc. A beautiful death: On Rosângela Rennó’s Última foto. In Prefix Photo #17, 2008, pp. 18-31.