Stefania Bril

Four or five decades ago, it would have been impossible to think about the context of photography in São Paulo and in Brazil without remembering the name and work of Stefania Bril. Thinking about how her name has been “erased” over time leads us to reflect on the circumstances of time that, so often unfairly, seem so arbitrary, as a consequence of the logics of visibility or invisibility determined by factual powers that exclude those who lived, felt, worked and expressed themselves aware of their uniqueness as women, through which they related to life and the world. Stefania left a legacy of more than 11,000 images, produced in just over a decade, in addition to theoretical and critical texts, in which she pioneered a reflection on photography from Brazil, a constellation of exhibitions, events and festivals she organized, as well as the books she published and the cultural center she promoted, dedicated to the practice of photography. In her images, we feel an extraordinary empathy with who is photographed and what she photographs. We find in them the dissent and subversion of the dominant stereotypes, the humor with which she questions reality with sweetness and gentleness, the awareness of who assumed herself as a woman in what she did, conscious that her condition as a woman photographer allowed her, in her words, to plunge “with more determination and passion into the world of ‘minorities‘, identifying herself with them – the world of children and women, that of the rejected or that of the elderly.”

Instituto Moreira Salles keeps and preserves Stefania Bril's archive, consisting of negatives, enlargements of photographs and authoral textual production, as well as photographs of third parties, correspondence with photographers and representatives of cultural institutions, newspaper and magazine clippings, interviews, and a library. Given the relevance of this legacy, we cannot help but feel that we have arrived late to this moment in which we share a selection of these materials in the selection offered in this exhibition, with the title Stefania Bril: Disobedience by Affection, a happy expression chosen by the curators, Ileana Pradilla Ceron and Miguel Del Castillo, to whom we thank for the research, rigor, and sensitivity they dedicated to this project. Presenting Stefania Bril's work in Brazil today also reveals our purpose of contributing to publicize the work of women photographers who, in Brazilian history, have interpreted the country and its realities from an insubordinate look at the patriarchal structure that still characterizes it, despite the struggles, work, and examples of so many women who also photographed it, of whom Stefania is a great example.

We express our gratitude to Stefania Bril's family for the trust placed in the IMS for the preservation and dissemination of her archive, as well as to all those who, both in our staff and in the teams that collaborated with us, allowed us to build and present this exhibition.

Instituto Moreira Salles - Board of Directors

Stefania Bril (Gdansk, 1922-São Paulo, SP, 1992), Jewish, Polish, Holocaust survivor, arrived in Brazil in 1950, already graduated in chemistry. After working in the biochemical and nuclear industries and raising her two daughters, in the late 1960s she joined the field of photography in São Paulo, initially as a photographer and later as a critic and curator, playing a prominent role in regularly signing texts in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo and moving the photography circuit, creating festivals, events and, in the end, directing an important cultural center such as Casa da Fotografia Fuji.

Intensely linked to the photographic production of her time, it is strange that her name has practically disappeared from the scene. As has happened with many authors – especially when it comes to women – Stefania's lack of recognition in discussions about photography prevented her work from becoming a reference in the visual culture of the country.

Stefania Bril: Disobedience by Affection is the first exhibition dedicated to the work of the photographer and critic in the last 30 years. Aware of the challenge of presenting a work so little seen and debated, more than organizing a retrospective, we sought to question the existence of a way of seeing by Stefania, capable of forming a singular discourse, and the contemporariness it could have.

Her photographic work was brief, but intense: there are about 11,000 frames, produced between 1969 and 1980, and which, together with her personal archive, which also contains her written and curatorial work, are part of the IMS collection. Although period copies made by the author are present in the exhibition, exemplifying the way she organized her work in series, the majority set was chosen and digitally expanded from the negatives – much of this material had never been exhibited by her. The exhibition organizes his photographic work into two major thematic nuclei: the city as a contradictory place of life, and the human beings who inhabit it, their diversity and attitudes that singularize them.

Both in biographical attitudes and in its photographic positioning, disobedience seems to emerge as one of the main traits that marked the life and work of Stefania Bril. Her work questions certain traditional criteria for valuing photography, such as the emphasis on subjects considered of public relevance – conflicts, images of “power” –, the fame of those portrayed, the perfect framing, the rarity of the scene or the risks taken to take the photo. Daily life, considered an unimportant theme, is affirmed by her as a space of resistance, even in the midst of a totalitarian context such as the years of lead in Brazil when she photographed.

At first glance, some of their images may seem simple; however, if we take the necessary time, they all invite us to enter them and discover the layers of reading they have. Little by little, for example, Stefania's critical position is revealed, who sees the bankruptcy of the modern city in the midst of the metropolises she photographed, and invests on affection as an antidote to the current structural violence, as can also be seen in her work as a portraitist.

Her photography happens in the flow, and his moment is not decisive, but imperfect and ordinary. Her hopeful and empathetic gaze, imbued with a deep belief in life, refuses the unifying, hierarchical, and patriarchal narratives that still shape social structures today.

Ileana Pradilla Ceron and Miguel Del Castillo, curators

Having spent her childhood and part of her adolescence in a vibrant Warsaw, Stefania Bril experienced its terrible devastation during World War II. Although she was not photographing yet, the image of the destruction of 90% of the Polish capital in the five years of the Nazi invasion seems to have marked her look and experience of the city.

On the other hand, wars in the 1970s Brazil were different. The military dictatorship persecuted and tortured its opponents, while announcing the “economic miracle” and the promising future of the country. São Paulo, the great Brazilian metropolis, was experiencing an expansionist boom, with infrastructure works as the driving force of development, while urban and social inequalities were growing.

In addition to the capital of the state of São Paulo, where she lived, Stefania photographed other metropolises, such as New York and Mexico City, and iconic cities such as Paris, Venice, and Amsterdam. His photos, however, do not show an enchantment with urban landscapes, innovative modernist architecture, or the unbridled movement. Nor do we find the particular characteristics of the cities portrayed; all scenes are marked by similar daily lives. Her particular gaze highlights unusual situations to expose the absurdity of modern life and, instead of reinforcing metropolitan stereotypes, illuminates traces of other types of societies – community, rural, artisanal – that are still latent in large centers.

These traces do not appear as signs of shortfall, nor are they seen through the lens of nostalgia. Stefania seems to photographically dismantle the homogenizing, oppressive city, and rebuild a city in which there is room for playfulness and laughter, thus making a creative exposure of the bankruptcy of modernity and the glimpse of another possible city.

Subnucleus Rest

In the anti-metropolis built by Bril's camera, the workers who maintain links with artisanal making stand out. Among its protagonists are street artists: painters, musicians, and designers who try, possibly with precariousness, to live from their creative activity.

The work system in the modern city, on the other hand, drives people to exhaustion. On the streets, the photographer finds men napping in their workplaces, perhaps resisting the logic of capitalist productivity, or simply exhausted by it.

Subnucleus Curiosity

Stefania seems to be always watching out to question stereotypical visions. Her gaze challenges the negative connotation of curiosity – attached to femininity in several cultural narratives, as in the myths of Eve and Pandora – as much as the recurring images of masculinity. She captures soldiers, police officers, and nuns in everyday moments, dismantling the rigidity of strongly hierarchical corporations, such as the Armed Forces and the Catholic Church.

Stefania Bril lived the end of her youth in a Poland under Nazi occupation, carrying a false identity. Disobeying the current law was, at that moment, one of the few possible gestures for the maintenance of life. Fear prevailed, as any eye contact with other people could identify her as Jewish, resulting in her death.

In Brazil, not by coincidence, Stefania chose the camera as an instrument to create encounters and express her genuine interest in people. She was not exactly a portraitist, but much of her work is composed of images in which the human figure is the protagonist. From strangers to her most intimate family circle, the portraits she produced demonstrate a non-indifferent and, above all, affectionate approach.

Contrary to the objectification of the individual, Stefania created images that are the antithesis of the social figure of the hero. In her photos, common people and traditional minority groups predominate, who do not fit the modern idea of “universal man”, synonymous with white and European.

Subnucleus Maria Miné, Mr. Eduardo and Mrs. Egydia

The people portrayed by Stefania are not usually publicly known figures. There are exceptions, however: Maria da Conceição Dias de Almeida, popularly called Maria Miné, and the couple Eduardo and Egydia Salles. Black people, of humble origin, they gained the admiration of the population in Campos do Jordão, a vacation town of the wealthy classes of São Paulo. Honored in her old age with an official medal, Miné was born near the end of the abolition of slavery, was a washerwoman in sanatoriums and a wet nurse. Mr. Eduardo and Mrs. Egydia, famous snack vendors, owned a restaurant frequented by the local elite, which at night turned into a dance hall. Stefania documented moments in their daily life and constituted an unconventional memory of these characters.

Family and affections are expanded in the portraits of the relatives of Mrs. Ermília, a matriarch whose daughter, Cecilia, worked in the domestic service of the Bril household. Although the absence of his surname and more information incurs the patterns of non-recognition so reiterated in photography made by white people, the images are far from being just documents about the “other”. The intimacy between photographer and portrayed, built over time, allowed the affective universe of a black family to be recorded inside their residence, something not so common in Brazilian photography of the mid-1970s.

The period copies made by Stefania Bril present in this space exemplify the way she organized her work in series, although these are not strict or closed categories. Since 1969, she has produced images of people for the group that would later be called Gente [People], and, from the following year, she began to display them along with others in the essay that would be known as As mãos [Hands]. Between 1972 and 1974, she defined some of the bases that would last in her work: the street as the place par excellence of her production and the creation of thematic categories to assist in the organization of her records of daily life. Belonging to this period are the first images of Descanso [Rest], portraits of men napping on the street in their workplaces, and the photographs later grouped under the Birutex category – a playful term, created with her friend Alice Brill, defined as “the wrong side of things”. Also included in the series were photographs of phrases on truck bumpers, Poetas de estrada [Road Poets], urban writing records, gathered under the title Novo dicionário da língua portuguesa [New Dictionary of the Portuguese Language), and documentation of her trip to Israel, produced in 1976.

From the late 1970s, Stefania Bril was one of the pioneers in articulating a social field for photography. She worked as a critic in the daily and specialized press, reviewing exhibitions, bringing instigating agendas to the medium and presenting great masters of photography. She published more than 400 texts, mainly in the O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper and in the Iris Foto magazine. She was also curator of exhibitions and organizer of festivals and events – from Encontros de Campos do Jordão to the culmination of her “dream of the impossible”, the creation of a space for photography, with Casa da Fotografia Fuji, a prominent cultural center in São Paulo. Her project was mainly pedagogical, aiming at visual literacy for a wide audience and stimulating critical views and exchanges of photographic experiences.