Thomaz Farkas, Allthepeople

Thomaz Farkas, Allthepeople

Together with his father, Desidério, Thomaz Farkas (1924-2011) turned Fotoptica from a store selling equipment for photography and cinema, into a space for exchange, shared experience, culture and projects: he created the Novidades Fotoptica newspaper which would become Fotoptica magazine, staged exhibitions in the corridor of the store on São Bento Street and at other company addresses, created the Audiovisual Department for the distribution of educational and documentary films, and an inhouse bookstore selling imported photography books.

With Geraldo de Barros he set up the first photography laboratory at MASP; with Jacob Ruchti and Miguel Forte he produced his solo exhibition at MAM-SP, the first photography exhibition in a Brazilian art museum; with Eduardo Salvatore, Chico Albuquerque and other members of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, he participated in countless photography events and salons; with José Medeiros he photographed Rio de Janeiro in black and white and in color; with Candido Portinari he photographed the 4th Centenary Ball; with the Callia brothers (Edmundo and Vinicio), and other colleagues from USP he developed a series of surrealist photographs; with architect Zanini Caldas he photographed the construction of Brasília; with Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes, he produced his first thesis on documentary cinema; with Geraldo Sarno, Paulo Gil Soares, Maurice Capovilla, Manuel Horacio Giménez, Sérgio Muniz and Eduardo Escorel, among others, he created documentary films for the series Brasil verdade [Brazil Truth] and Condição brasileira [Brazilian Condition]; with Paulo Vanzolini, he traveled to Amazonia, lost all of the cinematographic footage, but salvaged his color photographs from the region; with Rosely Nakagawa, he opened Galeria Fotoptica, the first photography gallery in Brazil; with his sons Pedro and Kiko Farkas he filmed Hermeto campeão [Hermeto Champion]; with Cristiano Mascaro, he participated in the collective exhibition at the Bienal de São Paulo Tradição e ruptura – Autorretrato do brasileiro [Tradition and Rupture – Brazilian Self-Portrait]; with Anna Carboncini and Fábio Magalhães, he comprised the selection committee for the Pirelli Photography Collection at MASP; with Solange Farkas, he created the Videobrasil project; with his children João, Kiko, Pedro and Bia Farkas he organized his archives and his legacy, almost entirely preserved today at Instituto Moreira Salles, at the Cinemateca Brasileira, the Museu da Imagem e do Som in Fortaleza, and in the family collection.

All of these activities and actions bear witness to his vision and Thomaz Farkas’ constant search for a cultural and creative practice in the field of the image, which is consistently inclusive, gregarious and collective. A vision expressed with clarity in the title of this exhibition celebrating the centenary of his birth, Thomaz Farkas, Allthepeople, a title borrowed from the film of the same name from 1978-1980, written and directed by Farkas himself, a generous portrait of his greatest popular passion: football.

This motif of aggregation, of collectivity, of forming groups, is a trait we identified and adopted as a fundamental reference for putting together this exhibition, based on our clear perception of Farkas’ sensitivity and generosity which we believe is woven both into the poetic fabric of his work and the political sense of his actions. This type of “individual-collective” exhibition we present here seeks to reinstate this quality which he pursued so tenaciously throughout his artistic and institutional life: the power of the group, of contamination, of learning from the other, and above all, of curiosity, which turned his films and photographs into records and mirror images of himself: “I identify with all and at the same time I am noone”, says Farkas in Walter Lima Jr’s affectionate portrait of him in Thomaz Farkas, brasileiro [Thomaz Farkas, Brazilian] (2004).

Hooray photography and cinema!

Hooray Thomaz Farkas!

Hooray!

Juliano Gomes
Rosely Nakagawa
Sergio Burgi

Thomaz Farkas: a singular camera bringing to light what had gone unseen

The paths of Thomaz Farkas, at life’s crossroads where he always knew how to make his way back to the tracks, breaking free from any knot that limited or held him back, or in his work with the image, in photography for cinema, where he managed to construct one of the most fascinating mechanisms for producing images of the world around him, are recorded and celebrated in this exhibition Thomaz Farkas, Allthepeople, with which Instituto Moreira Salles marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Generosity and singularity characterize every moment that Thomaz Farkas lived through and reinvented, encountering possibilities where they didn’t seem to exist. To live was, for him, always a transitive verb declined in this “living with others” which also paved the way for others to forge their own paths, indelibly marking the memory of all who had the privilege of meeting and working with him, in sharing and making, while simultaneously creating an outstanding body of personal work within the history of photography and cinema. These were always fields of interest to him, recognising in them the languages of his time that could best represent and interpret the human condition and human action.

In a Brazil so marked, then and now, by injustice and inequality, born into a family that created Fotoptica, one of the most decisive places in the history of photographic production in Brazil, Farkas always knew how to be both accomplice and support in his understanding that the resources available to him should be shared, so that others could do the work they were capable of doing. His work is an example and result of this generous practice, which never dissolved the singularity of his own gaze and expression. The ethical vigor of his relationship with the country in which he lived led to strong convictions that, rather than rhetoric, were ways of living and doing. His political courage is notable when we contextualize his work in a country whose historical vicissitudes he faced in the form of the dictatorship and serious restraints on freedom. Thomaz Farkas was always an artist and activist in his own art of being and acting in the world. The movement he made by shifting from photography to the field of film production and filmmaking testifies to this. In his doctorate thesis he reaffirms his “conviction that the best way of learning about Brazilian reality is only through documentary film”, understanding that “as an interpretation and not simply a description of the real, [it] can play an important role in the cultural process”. The creation of Galeria Fotoptica and its activities still shed light on demonstrating how commercial activity, in the bourgeois São Paulo of the time, could contribute to the development of a context and a program for art.

Thomaz Farkas, Allthepeople is an exhibition in which three axes, tributaries of the same river, converge to synthesize the life and work of Thomaz Farkas: photography; the Fotoptica store and gallery; and cinema. With this exhibition, Instituto Moreira Salles, which archives and preserves the photographic works of Thomaz Farkas, amounting to more than 34 thousand images, further deepens its mission to research and disseminate this incredibly precious and significant collection. The wealth and diversity of Thomaz Farkas’ work demanded the formation of a curatorial team for this project consisting of Juliano Borges, historian, researcher and cinema curator; Rosely Nakagawa, art and photography curator and a collaborator of Thomaz Farkas at Galeria Fotoptica; and Sergio Burgi, coordinator in the area of Photography at the IMS. To all we extend our deepest gratitude for the dedicated and rigorous work they developed. Considerable thanks are also due to the Cinemateca Brasileira, to Videobrasil, and to all the artists presented in this exhibition, as well as to the teams at Instituto Moreira Salles who have contributed to its realization. We leave a special word of thank in recognition to the Farkas family, namely João Farkas and Kiko Farkas, who was responsible for the graphic design of the exhibition and its catalog, for all of the care, friendship, time and dedication with which they have accompanied the entire project.

Board of Instituto Moreira Salles

Leaving the first Fotoptica store on São Bento Street, walking towards Sete de Abril Street, we crossed the Chá Viaduct, passing by Galeria Prestes Maia, Ramos de Azevedo Square, Theatro Municipal and the Hotel Esplanada, where Flávio de Carvalho’s May Salons were held. Beside 24 de Maio Street, on Marconi Street, was Alfredo Mesquita’s Jaraguá bookstore where a new generation of writers and painters gathered, the same people who would go to the IAB Artist’s Club in the Esther building. On the other side of the street, on the sidewalk that ran along the Mário de Andrade Library, you arrived at República Square. A new Fotoptica store had opened on Conselheiro Crispiniano Street, perpendicular to Sete de Abril, where the Diários Associados building was constructed, housing the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP), the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), the editorial team and the graphic design offices of Assis Chateaubriand’s Diário da Noite and Diário de S.Paulo newspapers and the regional office of O Cruzeiro magazine. This formed the most important cultural circuit in São Paulo at that time.

Throughout the 1940s, Thomaz Farkas consolidated his early photographic practice in direct contact with the city. He produced new images in color of the center of São Paulo. He worked with 35mm Kodachrome film and 10 x 12 cm plates, and around 1947 he documented the urban landscape around Fotoptica’s headquarters-store on São Bento, almost at the corner with São João Avenue. He also photographed Melanie Rechulski, his future wife, in exceptional color portraits taken on these same city streets.

Meanwhile in the Pacaembu neighborhood, near to the Farkas family home on Buri Street, the stadium was inaugurated in 1940. The young Thomaz photographed its construction and the transformations the neighborhood was going through. He documented in black and white the crowds of supporters on matchdays, highlighting elements of light and shadow in bold graphic shapes. In the center and in Pacaembu, he developed a significant early representation of the city in color and black and white, with people and crowds always present in the foreground and clearly evident. His gaze was always directed at everyone.

“With the large-scale introduction of the processes of obtaining photographs in natural colors, a new dimension was revealed, entirely altering the means of expression that had constituted black and white photography. Color in photography, like sound in cinema, should be used in the same way: with discretion, underlining and aiding the principal modes of transmission of ideas. [...] Just as when in sound film the silence enhances the subsequent sounds, the absence of color also emphasizes neighboring colored regions. Everyone knows of the composition in photography and its extraordinary importance; just as there is composition in forms, there is also composition of colors, which has its own rules, which must be learned and respected. [...] In the same way we take photographs of semi-abstract subjects, such as, for example, a stone wall in black and white, we can, securely, make the same subjects in colors, observing the rules of harmony and composition inherent to colors.”

Thomaz Farkas, “Fotografia – Caminhos diversos”, Iris, August 1948

Born in 1924, in Hungary, Thomaz Farkas arrived in Brazil in 1930 with his father, Desidério, and his mother, Tereza. Located on São Bento Street in downtown São Paulo, Fotoptica was dedicated to the sale of photographic and cinematographic equipment and products and had been opened in the early 1920s by his father on a previous trip, together with two employees of the family company Hafa (Hatschek and Farkas) in Budapest. They had come to Brazil to expand the family business, creating, at the same time, an alternative for a possible exit from a Europe that was already showing signs of new conflicts and extremism, including growing anti-Semitism throughout the region. In February 1940, the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante [Photo Cine Clube Bandeirante] (FCCB), founded a year earlier, moved from the Martinelli building to the first floor of São Bento Street, 357, currently 389, the same address as the Fotoptica store, which occupied the entire ground floor. Thomaz Farkas enrolled at the Polytechnic School of USP in 1943, where he graduated in mechanical and electrical engineering in 1947. At the same time that he began college, he started working in the family store and became the youngest member of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante. In addition to using the store's laboratory, which Farkas had set up, he and the FCCB members organized exhibitions in its hallways.

The interaction at university with students with different origins and from other regions of the country, combined with the numerous study trips he took, led him to expand his interest and reflection on images to include other areas of research and relationships, and he established strong ties with the cultural scene in Rio de Janeiro during this period. As a member of the Photography Committee of the newly founded São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), he designed and installed the museum's laboratory with photographer Geraldo de Barros, at the request of Pietro Maria Bardi. From 1941 to 1954, he participated actively, through the FCCB, in numerous photography salons, including the first international color photography exhibitions.

Surrealism, the visual arts movement that turns 100 in 2024, arose as a reaction to the horrors lived through in the period between the First and Second World War, the first armed conflicts documented by photography. In Brazil, the movement’s first adherents included Tarsila do Amaral, Maria Martins, and Cícero Dias, and later on Marcello Grassmann and Fernando Lemos, among others, in addition to Aníbal Machado and Mário Pedrosa, in literature. Together with university colleagues, such as the Callia brothers, Capote Valente and Marcelo Grassmann, Thomaz would meet to create Surrealist photo-essays, some of which were produced with José Medeiros, a young photographer from Piauí state who had moved to Rio. In the context of his formal and aesthetic experimentations, the golden ratio, also present in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, deftly and rigorously adapted to 35mm cameras, impacted the vision of the young photographer and engineering student, as did the composition and precision in the capture of textures in photographic film in medium and large formats, which documented the light and shade, and the human skin and objects, present in the work of Edward Weston. These influences marked Farkas’ photographic production during this period. He took photographs in which the geometric forms of contemporary architecture framed the shadows cast by the light, while also experimenting with the representation of these and other formal elements in color images produced on Kodachrome 35mm film. He published photo essays on his studies of light and shadow in Rio magazine in 1946 and others on movement in dance, such as the images of the choreography La Création, in the same magazine in 1949. He traveled to the United States in 1948 where, in New York, he visited Edward Steichen, director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and, in California, he met personally with photographer Edward Weston.

In the 1940s, Farkas produced a range of studies and investigations in the field of photography and cinema, including extensive experimentation with photographic and cinematographic materials in color. His reflections were systematized in the article published in Íris magazine in August, 1948, “Fotografia – Caminhos diversos” [Photography – Diverse Paths], which considers themes such as photography and cinema, surrealist experimentation, photography of movement in dance and sport, color photography, documentary and press photography, photography as an instrument in the construction of knowledge and citizenship, and the role of criticism, of the public and the artist in the arts and in culture. At 24, Farkas was already consolidating what would come to be his principal contribution to the field of photography: a posture of investigation and permanent action around the multiple paths and potentiality of the image.

Thomaz Farkas – Estudos fotográficos [Thomaz Farkas – Photographic Studies] was the first photography exhibition held in an art museum in Brazil. He conceived and organized the exhibition in July 1949 at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo (MAM-SP), in association with architects Miguel Forte and Jacob Ruchti. This exhibition is being displayed here for the first time in its original design, 75 years after it was first shown.

Images and expography interact here aimed at allowing the visiting public to construct and infer different meanings and sensations. Farkas deliberately activates a formal experimentation, on the border between abstraction and figuration, a characteristic of the period which would also provoke changes to photographic language in the country. At the same time, he intentionally explores other possibilities and paths in the field of photography, through images that consider the relationships between photography and movement, and, in particular, in the multiple dimensions and possibilities of documentary images.

In the photographs he took in the historic center and suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, in the peripheral coastal regions of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and in the historic cities of Minas Gerais, he focuses closely on people, their cultures, and their diversity. Here he records the lives of individuals who experience realities significantly different from those of his place of origin, São Paulo, at the time gripped by the dynamic of the vertiginous growth of a cosmopolitan metropolis. Similar to other photographers of the period who moved from formal experimentation towards the social engagement of documentary photography, throughout the 1950s Farkas gradually opted for an ever greater commitment to the country's cultural and political scenario, which would lead him into documentary photography and film in the 1960s.

Throughout the 1950s, Farkas increasingly developed activities related to the film industry. As technical director at Fotoptica, he was responsible for driving the sales of 16mm and 8mm film equipment in the stores, in addition to implementing new film development services for the public and launching an initiative to disseminate educational and educational films through the company's Audiovisual Department. On a more personal and artistic level, he documented the musician and composer Pixinguinha and the Old Guard of Samba on 16mm film, in a memorable performance at Ibirapuera Park during the celebrations for the Fourth Centennial of the city of São Paulo in 1954.

Between 1958 and 1960, he traveled to Brasília in the company of fellow architects involved in the construction of Brazil’s new capital, where many individuals and families from the Northeast and other regions of the country also migrated in search of work. The images he took of satellite towns and the precarious housing conditions of the workers, in parallel with the documentation of the construction of the new capital and the occupation of the cerrado biome, reveal a critical perspective, although also one of simultaneous enthusiasm for the project led by Juscelino Kubitschek, already clearly pointing towards his decision to work in documentary cinema which he went on to pursue in the following years. On the day of the inauguration of Brasília, he photographed images frame by frame very close to Juscelino and the official car, which could almost be described as cinematic, forming a perfectly framed record. The sequence dialogues with images and scenes produced by Farkas that also show the enthusiasm of the working population who walk along the Eixo Monumental, admiring the revolutionary architecture that projected and promised a new country that would never come to fruition. The violent implementation of a military regime brought a dramatic end to an entire social, economic and cultural project that had been underway throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, of which Farkas was already a part. His photographs of Brasília, a few years before the 1964 coup, already reveal his clear engagement with Brazilian social and political issues at that time.

It was through his friendship with José Medeiros, a photographer for the magazine O Cruzeiro in Rio de Janeiro, that Farkas expanded his relationships in the country’s former capital with young artists and intellectuals, such as the artist Sansão Castello Branco, set designer Anísio Medeiros and playwright Francisco Pereira da Silva, who would go on to become director of the National Library. As such, Farkas built and consolidated several circles of activity and interest in the city, associating himself with a new scene in the field of culture that comprised students, artists and intellectuals interested in developing a national identity with closer links to Brazil's cultural and social roots. In Rio de Janeiro, during the 1940s, he learned about and photographed the deepest roots of the country's culture, in particular those associated with the African diaspora in Brazil and the Americas linked to slavery, expressed in music and dance, but also evident in the social stratification and segregationist legacy of Brazilian society. With friends and other visitors he traveled through and experienced the city's historic center and suburbs: the hills, the music, the composers, the joy, the candomblé, the camaraderie, and the street life. It was also in Rio de Janeiro that met his future wife, Melanie Rechulski, a sociologist, psychologist, and psychoanalyst. She was introduced to him by her sister, Fanny Rechulski, who worked with the writer Jorge Amado, then a federal deputy and member of the National Constituent Assembly for the Brazilian Communist Party. Fanny, in turn, would go on to marry Jorge's brother, the physician Joelson Amado.

The perception of the importance of documentary images, already present in the photographic works presented in 1949, would lead Farkas to opt, throughout the 1950s, for an even closer connection with the country's cultural and political realities, in particular by developing ideas and projects focused on documentary cinema. As such, he was paving a path in the field of images aimed at overcoming the challenges associated with citizenship in Brazil through the construction and dissemination of knowledge and information through audiovisual media. This proposal would be consolidated from the beginning of the 1960s, when Farkas began to work as a film producer, cinematographer and, later, director of his own films in documentary film projects initially intended for general distribution, which he created together with young filmmakers from 1963 onwards. The desire to use documentary film as a tool for fostering a critical perspective of Brazilian reality married with the technical innovation of Nagra sound recorders and silent and portable 16mm cameras, opened up new perspectives for simultaneously capturing the image and voice of Brazilians, yielding a new dimension of poetry and expression. Two series stand out among the works he produced. Brasil verdade [Brazil Truth] was the first, comprising four medium-length black-and-white documentary films, made between 1964 and 1965: the short films Memória do cangaço [Memory of the Cangaço] (1964), directed by Paulo Gil Soares; Subterrâneos do futebol [Soccer’s Underground] (1965), directed by Maurice Capovilla; Nossa escola de samba [Our Samba School] (1965), directed by Manuel Horacio Giménez; and Viramundo [Turnworld] (1965), directed by Geraldo Sarno, which, were later brought together to form part of the feature film Brasil verdade in 1968. The 35mm film was shown at cinemas and had a reasonable impact, receiving an Honorable Mention at the Governor of the State of São Paulo Award in July 1966. These films continued to be distributed through the production company Thomaz Farkas Filmes Culturais [Thomaz Farkas Cultural Films], which produced a total of 37 short, medium and feature-length films, nine of which were grouped into two series: Brasil verdade and Herança do Nordeste [Heritage of the Northeast]. A few years later, in 1969 and 1970, this group of filmmakers, together with new collaborators, in association with Farkas, would go on to produce a second series of documentary films, this time primarily in color, entitled Condição brasileira [Brazilian Condition].

In 1955, photographer Edward Steichen, director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organized one of the most ambitious photography exhibitions, The Family of Man, a declaration of solidarity with a civilization that was recovering from World War II. The exhibition explored the most diverse aspects of photography, leading Thomaz Farkas, already very involved with cinema, to reinforce his perception of the power of the social documentary image, drawing comparisons and associations with Glauber Rocha's Cinema Novo, for example, which showed Brazil through his own political and revolutionary perspective in his fiction films, such as Black God, White Devil, from 1964.

Up until then, documentary had been seen as a lesser form of cinema, devoid of poetic potential, a documentary tool with little possibility of materializing an inventive, critical, elaborate and dialogic perspective. The first set of films directed by Farkas in 1964 and 1965, brought together in the Brasil verdade series, established documentary cinema as one of the spearheads of a critical, thoughtful, innovative audiovisual culture, in direct dialogue with the fictional core of the Cinema Novo group. In a second phase, with an expanded group of photographers and filmmakers, against the backdrop of the military regime and shortly after the implementation of Institutional Act No. 5, Thomaz Farkas delved into the depths of Brazil, in search of a broad-ranging and diverse account of the country's reality. The series Condição brasileira [Brazilian Condition], produced by Farkas, comprises 19 medium and short documentary films, most of them in color, made between 1969 and 1971 in the interior of the Northeast. The idea began as a set of films about various cultural manifestations from the Northeast and developed by combining a desire to investigate the practices of popular cultural production together with another impetus, that of contemporaneity, of looking at how such practices that had survived from other times had combined with increasing urbanization, mass culture and constantly evolving technological artifacts. These two lines run singular courses through all of the films in the set, varying in emphasis, tone and nuance.

The films in the series A condição brasileira – consisting of 19 medium and short documentary films, the majority in color, made between 1969 and 1971 in the interior of the Northeast and produced by Farkas – were directed by the following directors: A cantoria [The Singing] (1969-1970), O engenho [The Mill] (1969-1970), Casa de farinha [Flour Mill] (1970), Jornal do sertão [Sertão Newspaper] (1969-1970), Os imaginários [The Imaginary] (1970), Região Cariri [Cariri Region] (1970), Viva Cariri [Hooray Cariri] (1969- 1970) and Vitalino Lampião (1969), by Geraldo Sarno; A mão do homem [The Hand of Man] (1969-1970), A morte do boi [The Death of the Ox] (1970), Erva bruxa Witch Grass] (1970), Frei Damião: trombeta dos aflitos, martelo dos hereges [Friar Damião: Trumpet for the Afflicted, Hammer for Heretic] (1970), Jaramataia (1969-1970), O homem do couro [The Man in the Leather] (1969-1970), Padre Cícero [Father Cícero] (1971) and Vaquejada (1970), by Paulo Gil Soares; Rastejador, substantivo masculino [Crawler, Masculine Noun] (1970) and Beste (1970), by Sergio Muniz; and Visão de Juazeiro [Vision of Juazeiro] (1970), by Eduardo Escorel. Affonso Beato was responsible for the photography in most of the films in the series, with assistance from Lauro Escorel, Farkas himself and in the film by Eduardo Escorel, Jorge Bodanzky. In addition to acting as a producer of the films and directing the photography for some, Farkas also worked as an additional cameraman in others. The films and the complete technical production details of the 37 films produced by Thomaz Farkas can be found on the Thomaz Farkas Channel.

This floor of the exhibition covers Thomaz Farkas’ career from the early 1970s onwards. His earlier career in photography and cinema is presented in the gallery on the upper floor (eighth floor) of this cultural center.

The presence of moving images in Thomaz Farkas's career and work dates back to his formative years in the 1940s. On his first trip to the United States, Farkas met and later corresponded with one of the most important filmmakers in the history of world avant-garde cinema, the Ukrainian-born Maya Deren, who lived in the United States. Considered a pioneer of much of the experimental cinema that would be produced in the United States, a figure whose legacy, daring in its form, combined artisanal methodology and conceptual sophistication. Thus, it is safe to say that Farkas's gateway into the world of moving images is characterized by the spectrum of modernist and avant-garde practices. Curiously, this contrasts with the more consensual impression displayed throughout his entire cinematographic production, with its focus on documentary practice, which until today suffers from prejudice in terms of its dimension of formal and conceptual elaboration. Farkas' pioneering doctoral thesis, defended at USP in the 1970s, was initially presented in 1969 as a documentary photographic project on the Northeast region and later converted into a text about the experience of his film production, entitled Cinema documentário: um método de trabalho [Documentary Cinema: A Working Method]. Not a genre, but rather a method. A practice of opening up a constant dialogue with the outside, with what is before us, combining interpretative sensitivity with attentive and curious openness. The “Farkas method”, even before his relationship cinema as such, has always been: to change oneself through fraternal contact with the other.

For political reasons Thomaz was unable to defend his doctoral thesis in 1972, under the supervision of Professor Flávio Motta, as the committee of professors destined to evaluate his work was rejected by the rector of the University of São Paulo. The committee included historian and film critic Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes and sociologist Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, among other important professors. In 1974, Farkas and professors José Freitas Nobre and José Marques de Melo were removed from their teaching positions in the Department of Cinema and Journalism at the School of Communications and Arts at the São Paulo University (ECA-USP) for political reasons. It was only in December 1977 that Thomaz defended his thesis, returning to teach at ECA in 1979.

The photographs taken by Thomaz Farkas in the early 1970s in the Northeast and North of Brazil, seen now in perspective, form a dialogue with the production of a whole new generation of photographers who would become better known in the late 1970s, following the movements surrounding the amnesty and the end of the military regime. This was a period in which the country's artistic and cultural scene was gradually becoming reestablished through art circuits, with the renovation of museums and the opening of new galleries, including Galeria Fotoptica, inaugurated in 1979 on Farkas' initiative. These developments helped to bring visibility to this new generation, who consisted predominantly of young people fresh out of university from a range of backgrounds, embracing photography as a language and form of expression in a cultural and political context of resistance and overcoming adversity. This dialogue between Farkas' photographic and cinematographic work with new generations is also echoed in the works of contemporary artists, such as photographer Samuel Macedo and filmmakers Arthur Lins and André Moura, with examples their work presented here in dialogue with Farkas' photographic and cinematographic production developed during the project Condição brasileira.

In the early 1970s, in direct association and in parallel with the film series Condição brasileira, Farkas undertook an extensive color photography project using Kodachrome and Ektachrome film. He recorded the interior of the Northeast, Bahia and the Amazon, their inhabitants and activities, in images of a documentary and authorial nature. These images confirm Farkas' continued photographic practice throughout the 1970s. He photographed the Cariri region of Pernambuco and neighboring states extensively, in association with the films in the documentary series in production.

In 1976, zoologist and composer Paulo Vanzolini led Thomaz Farkas and Geraldo Sarno on a trip to the Amazon. The group, consisting of a scientist who was also a musician, samba singer and composer, a businessman/photographer, and a filmmaker in search of the real Brazil, prepared images and sounds for the production of a feature film, but the material was lost during the trip. The photographs Farkas took during the trip have survived. They are colored images that bear witness to the light of dawn and dusk, to light and dark rain, and finally to the many suggestions of the apparent immateriality of the Amazon's wealth, broadening the view of the region in a far-reaching project that sought to consolidate information and visual records about this biome that is so vital to the survival of life on the planet. Bahia appeared in Thomaz's life through his friend, writer and activist Jorge Amado, who lived in Rio de Janeiro. The two met in the mid-1940s, in the period before the writer's political exile in Argentina, Uruguay and Europe. Through the marriage of Farkas' sister-in-law to Jorge Amado's brother, the closeness between the Farkas and Amado families allowed the photographer and filmmaker to gain an in-depth understanding of Bahian culture, with which he identified so strongly that he actually wanted to be a Bahian, producing an expressive set of photographs in the capital and the interior of the state. Farkas participated in the Jornada de Cinema da Bahia [Bahia Film Festival] from its inception, a festival of resistance during the years of the military dictatorship organized by Guido Araújo, Cosme Alves Netto and Roland Schaffner. The creation of the Brazilian Association of Documentarists within the festival and the popularization of Super-8 revealed a new generation of Bahian filmmakers, who, among other awards, received the Fotoptica Award.

Fotoptica Gallery was created in 1979 in participation with Rosely Nakagawa and was later managed by Isabel Amado until its closure at the end of the 1990s. It has hosted hundreds of exhibitions of contemporary artists, such as Maureen Bisilliat, Claudia Andujar, Mazda Peres, Iole de Freitas, Nair Benedicto, Elza Lima, Carlos Moreira, Mario Cravo Neto, Luiz Braga, Sebastião Salgado, Miguel Rio Branco, Cassio Vasconcelos and Alex Flemming. The gallery recovered and presented works by Gioconda Rizzo, Madalena Schwartz, José Medeiros, Chico Albuquerque, Gaspar Gasparian, José Oiticica, and Geraldo de Barros, among other modern artists. The creation of this gallery in São Paulo was so impactful thanks to Thomaz Farkas’ strategic vision for the dissemination of contemporary Brazilian photography. It was the first step towards the changes that would take place in subsequent years leading up to the current scenario, in which the major museums and galleries in Brazil feature a considerable number of photography exhibitions in their annual programs. The Galeria Fotoptica collection, built up over the years in which it was open to the public at both locations and at MAC-USP, brings together a body of important photographers, including a new generation of professionals who came of age in the 1980s. Throughout its existence, the Galeria Fotoptica, in partnership with INFOTO and other institutions, developed programs to promote photography throughout the country. The gallery supported and hosted the exhibitions of the International Photography Month, organized by the Nafoto collective (Núcleo Amigos da Fotografia) [Friends of Photography Nucleus], created with other professionals who today play strategic roles in Brazilian photography. In this section, in addition to the presentation of several works from the Galeria Fotoptica Collection, comprising works by photographers who exhibited at the gallery between 1979 and 1996, some associations between Farkas' images and those of the photographers present in the collection have also constructed, to simulate a coexistence by affinity. They suggest that Thomaz Farkas and his passion for photography could have coexisted with the work of these authors, given his attentive view of Brazilian culture in its manifestations, colors and traditions, as well as in the multiple languages ​​of the medium, equally present in the perspectives of several generations of photographers who passed through the walls of Galeria Fotoptica throughout its two decades of activity. It is as if he had created the gallery space to promote Brazilian photography and, 40 years later, he and the other photographers can now dialogue and flourish together. Allthepeople together.

Thomaz Farkas' keen eye for Brazilian culture in its manifold manifestations, coupled with his avid interest in the multiple languages ​​and possibilities of the field of images, also led him to work on several other fronts in the field of arts and knowledge: at the Cinemateca Brasileira, the Fundação Bienal, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and São Paulo University, and in particular at the VídeoBrasil Festival, alongside other projects and institutions dedicated to culture and the construction of citizenship.

The introduction of video into the amateur consumer market in the early 1980s brought about major transformations in the fields of cinema, photography and audiovisual languages. A direct offshoot of the imaging technologies associated with the introduction of television in the 1950s, technological resources for recording and transmitting information electronically evolved rapidly, also paving the way for digital technologies and the processing of data and information. The amateur video market, which was expanding rapidly, was already signaling broader and more radical changes that would soon take place in the field of images as new digital technologies continued to develop.

As a business leader and also a producer and director in the field of photography and cinema, Thomaz Farkas understood and paid close attention to the profound changes that were unfolding at the time. It was no coincidence that, at the same time that he began supporting the Videobrasil Festival project, the company Fotoptica also changed its logo, incorporating elements of color and graphics that alluded to electronic images, leaving behind the logo that, over the course of four decades, had identified the company with the traditional technology of the analog photographic and cinematographic process. A new brand that also pointed towards the new era of digital images.

The Videobrasil Festival, a landmark event for audiovisual language in the country, followed its own path after the first editions with support from Farkas and Fotoptica, while maintaining direction from Solange Farkas, the project's creator. It became a space for reflection and critical thinking about new media and languages, embracing a whole new generation of producers and filmmakers in this field.

The transformations brought about by digital images have radically repositioned the industry and services in this area, causing the disappearance and/or shrinkage of traditional industries and brands, such as Kodak, Ilford and Agfa, while also impacting many trade and service companies in the production chain, including Fotoptica itself. At the same time, filmmakers and artists in the field of images reinvented themselves and appropriated these new means of production, creation and circulation of content. Thomaz followed suit, and, in the last two decades of his life, reconnected with his lifelong photographic and cinematographic work, redefining it together and in dialogue with countless interlocutors and institutions in Brazil and abroad.

In addition to being an important photographer in the consolidation of the modern tradition of Brazilian photography, Farkas also developed a solid career in cinema. The films he produced left their mark on Brazilian documentary cinema and were the beginning of a transformation that influenced several filmmakers. His relationship with auteur cinema began with his conversations, while still in his youth, with filmmaker Maya Deren in 1948. In 1949, the same year of his photography exhibition at MAM-SP, Farkas and Luiz Andreatini made the short film Estudos, uma pesquisa estética de rostos e gestos [Studies, an Aesthetic Survey of Faces and Gestures], which won the special prize in 1950 at the 1st National Cinematographic Competition for Amateurs, promoted by Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante. The only copy of Estudos was lost.

In 1954, he recorded a Pixinguinha concert held on April 25 at Ibirapuera Park on 16 mm black and white film with no audio, during the celebrations of the 4th Centennial of the city of São Paulo. This film, also lost for around 50 years, was found by Farkas and given sound in 2004, resulting in the award-winning documentary Pixinguinha e a velha guarda do samba [Pixinguinha and the Old Guard of Samba] (1954-2006), which he himself directed. Three other films comprise the entire body of his cinematographic work as a director and screenwriter: Paraíso, Juarez [Paradise, Juarez] (1971), which documents the work of the Bahian artist in the foyer of a cinema in Salvador, which was about to be demolished; Todomundo [Allthepeople] (1978-1980), a generous perspective of the country and its greatest popular passion, football; and Hermeto campeão [Hermeto Champion] (1981), a documentary that reaffirms his profound connection with music and with the inventiveness and creativity present in the culture and life of the Brazilian people.