La Mirada - Looking at Photography in Latin America Today

Nine positions from the photographic holdings of Daros Latin America are here shown to the public; they represent artists insufficiently or even entirely unknown in this country. The spectrum of works by these artist photographers ranges from straight photography to the staged image, and dates from the past two decades. The provenance of the photographers, whose artistic thinking is defined by the medium of photography, extends from Chile to Mexico and Cuba; in age, they span close to three generations.

La Mirada describes not only the gaze of the camera directed towards a specific subject, but also the artistic attitude and mental approach of the nine artist photographers, whose diverse views on photography become apparent to the interested beholder. Ultimately La Mirada also stands for our European views on art in Latin America.

Part I - October 25, 2002 to January 4, 2003

A few significant works from the prolific œuvre of the New York-based, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz (b. 1961) reveal his artistic strategy. Whether he targets Sigmund Freud, Che Guevara, Spaghetti Marinara, a painting by Courbet, or the art of North American Minimalists, Muniz cheerfully plunders the visual inventory of the media and art history with scintillating wit and a sparkling, inventive imagination. He puts our perception to the test by deftly alienating his subject matter in trompe l’esprit pictures that draw our attention to what a picture actually is.

Rosângela Rennó (b. 1962), from Rio de Janeiro, resurrects forgotten photographs from the most diverse aspects of daily life. Political and social concerns go hand-in-hand in her work with a skillful aesthetic transformation of artistically processed visual materials. Cicatriz (Scar) is what the artist calls a work in several parts, consisting of early 20th-century photographs of Brazilian prisoners with tattoos, which she discovered in a Brazilian penitentiary. Rennó’s poetic pictures oscillate between beauty, pain, and sensuality. Her sensitive treatment of this extraordinary archive of photographs is entirely beholden to the idea of human dignity.

Entre os olhos, o deserto (Between the Eyes, the Desert) is a symphonic panorama with a minimalist soundtrack by the Brazilian Miguel Rio Branco (b. 1946), based in Rio de Janeiro. The artist’s extensive projection of slides confronts us with an opulent, visually enthralling flood of pictures, resembling an epic, filmed narrative. An impeccable and perfectly choreographed scenario unfolds before our eyes and gradually casts such a strong spell on us that we willingly surrender the desire to know exactly how the sequences of pictures are interrelated. The voluptuous impact of the dark and sometimes mysterious imagery bespeaks an intoxicating sensuality. We witness a concentrated sequence of pictures of overwhelming existential density, which plumbs the metamorphoses of life in ceaseless transformations of overwhelmingly poetic and emotional vigor.

Maruch Sántiz Gómez (b. 1975) from San Cristóbal de las Casas in the Mexican state of Chiapas is a newcomer to the field of photo art. Within the context of an ambitious, large-scale photographic project, the young Chiapan woman has begun in the past few years to collect and aesthetically reinterpret old folk sayings. Her Creencias (traditional sayings and maxims of her own people) present simple objects of everyday life, labeled with their saying in the artist’s native language of Tzotzil. The synthesis of text and image lends the photographed objects an enigmatic, poetic aura. By slipping into the anthropologist’s role with a striking lucidity and disarming openness, Maruch Sántiz Gómez tells us more about her culture than any textbook could ever do. In addition, she playfully calls on us to think about our own (cultural as well as personal) Creencias: starting out as curious, amused voyeurs, we suddenly find that we have become the object of our own observations.

Santería, an Afro-Cuban cult, a syncretic mix of African Yoruba beliefs and Christian Catholicism, defines the iconographic repertoire of the Cuban artist Marta María Pérez Bravo (b. 1959), who lives in Monterrey, Mexico. Pérez Bravo’s black-and-white photographs are a far cry from any literal rendition of cult activities. The artist always acts as her own model, producing quiet, concentrated, clear and simple images of great symbolic and metaphoric power, in which she transcends the purely cultic to address the essentials of human existence. Suffering, violence, and death, or being the victim of alien and unknown forces, are as much part of these photographs as the artist’s self-determined exploration of her own personal worlds.

Part II - January 17 to April 26, 2003

Las aguas baldías (Water Wastelands) is the title of a photo series by Cuban Manuel Piña (b. 1958), who lives in Havana. The Malecón, the famous wall that runs along the coastal promenade of Havana, has always been the subject of romantic, sentimental projections for Cubans, but by the beginning of the nineties when Piña took his series of photographs, it had become a symbol of hopelessness. Piña’s dramatically condensed series is essentially an embodiment of the Malecón not only as a monument to helplessness and decay but also as a beacon of potential openness and freedom. Banal, ugly daily life clashes with the image of eternity. The Malecón becomes an organic, osmotic, and permeable border between inside and outside, a border that shifts mentally as the inner and outer horizons of the viewer change in keeping with the changing horizons of the water and the Malecón.

The sepia portraits made by Guatemalan Luis González Palma (b. 1957), currently based in Córdoba, Argentina, show his sitters in a frontal, immobile, and mute pose, gazing at us with focused concentration, while seeming, at the same time, to look straight through us. In motionless symmetry they direct an inscrutable gaze at the viewer; they appear mighty and monumental and yet also full of melancholic poetry. Sometimes shown with enigmatic accessories, they are like creatures utterly removed from reality and divested of any specific individuality. As if coming from another, immaterial, alien world, these countenances confront us with an incredible presence—silent but unaccusing.

For decades Paz Errázuriz (b. 1944) has been working in Santiago, Chile, on photo series of social minorities. In large groups of works she devotes herself to such subject matters as circus life, vaudeville actors, the last remaining Indians at the southernmost tip of the country, mental patients, inmates of asylums, old women on the fringes of society, transvestites at the time of the military dictatorship. She accompanies these groups with great sensitivity and tact, establishing a close atmosphere of trust that allows her to document the often precarious living conditions of the people she portrays. Gentle, palpably empathetic, the artist’s gaze is characterized by respect and distance, but without glossing over a drastic reality and without sidestepping the abysses of human existence.

The Brazilian Mario Cravo Neto (b. 1947) lives in Salvador, Bahia, which is an inexhaustible source of visual material for his compositions. A fundamentally spiritual attitude blends in his photographs with a sophisticated, aesthetic power of expression. He has mastered the entire spectrum from the fragile, tender poetry to such existential issues as violence, fear, and death. Playfully he comes up with unprecedented compositions of great symbolic power and impact. Human faces alternate with subject matter that resembles a still life or enigmatic dream imagery that never quite divulges its secrets. Mario Cravo Neto’s photographs are full of charm and tenderness, sensuality and emotion, desire and longing.