Luiz Braga - Imaginary Archipelago

Seeing up close: Luiz Braga and the Amazon

Luiz Braga: Imaginary Archipelago is an exhibition that takes on a celebration as much as it leads a revelation. On the one hand, it celebrates the artist’s 50-year career anniversary; on the other hand, it presents a vast collection of previously unseen images that broaden the comprehension of his work. Thus, paths are opened to the understanding of a very particular photographic practice and to the knowledge of this unique view of a territory with which the photographer has built a relationship of enchantment and loyalty to its peoples and lives, as well as to its landscapes and routes.

We now know that in Luiz Braga’s work, recognised by a unique use of light and colour, many of its principles are equally present in the black-and-white images, much broader than expected. In the practice of the portrait, we find a subversion peculiar to the genre, as an anti-portrait. In turn, the extraordinary empathy and sine qua non complicity between these images and the people and places they reveal dismantle and revolutionise the colonial appropriation and exotification that characterise much of the history of photography.

Belém do Pará, Marajó Island and Amazon in general are territories to which the artist has dedicated his life, taking on a feeling of belonging that does not exclude the awareness of the differences between his identity and those of the people photographed, in their cultures, trades, and experiences, to which we get closer through these images. As in the water confluences that are characteristic of the Amazon territories, Luiz Braga’s work is a pororoca of the emotions it evokes when it shows a person, a house, a boat, a place, imbued with quilombola (maroon) and riverside ancestries summoned in the experiences presented.

Seeing up close seems to be the essential rule of the photographer’s action, in contrast to the short-sightedness Brazil has dedicated to the Amazon. It is considered by a large part of Brazil as a territory where nothing existed before the colonisers’ arrival, as if the forest and its natural and human ecosystems were nothing before the arrival of loggers, miners, and other agents of a “civilisation” that disregards pre-existing living conditions and knowledge.

This exhibition is a significant project for Instituto Moreira Salles, an institution that dedicates special attention to photography and to issues related to the statute of imagery in the contemporary world, both in its archive and in its exhibition programming. We are very thankful to Bitu Cassundé, curator of the exhibition, and to Maria Luiza Meneses, curatorial assistant, not only for the rigorous and outstanding curatorial selection, but also for all the dedication and enthusiasm they have devoted to the construction of this project. A special word of acknowledgment to all the IMS staff that once again made this accomplishment possible.

Finally, we wish to express our deepest gratitude to Luiz Braga. All that we learned from him was moving, with all the affection and enormous enthusiasm with which he embraced and joined the process, and all the trust he put upon us to develop this outlook on his work, which we hope can be worthy of the admiration with which we now honour and promote it.

Instituto Moreira Salles Board

Luiz Braga: Imaginary Archipelago is the monographic exhibition of the photographer from Pará who portrays the visuality of some territories in the northern region of Brazil. The panoramic exhibition, which is not a retrospective, covers his 50-year career through 258 photographs – 190 of which previously unseen – and highlights intimacy, the ordinary and the gesture of “peeping” as poetic methodologies. From the analogue production that characterised his first decades of work to his most recent works, the selection triggers interests and techniques that cross temporalities. The cultural identity of the North, especially in the state of Pará, appears in scenes inside houses and shops, records of coexistence in common spaces, images that demonstrate collective traditions of daily life along the river, expressions of ancestry and faith and the creation of a speculative imaginary of life in the urban and peripheral Amazon.

Based on an essayistic perspective of Luiz Braga's archive, the exhibition presents the photographer's production through the interests that have pulsed in his work throughout the years, in a journey where time is a fluid, non-chronological element. The result is a set of nine nuclei permeable to each other: “O outro, o alheio” [The Other, the Alien] explores the relationships between the artist, the characters captured and their environments; in “Territórios e pertencimentos – O Norte” [Territories and Belongingings – The North] there are the cultural transits established between the different spaces in the region; “Arquitetura da intimidade” [Architecture of Intimacy] fictionalizes the nature of the ordinary, with common objects and traces of everyday life, in an archaeology of life; “Afazeres e trabalhos” [Tasks and Work] combines the trades and their places linked to a particular time-space notion; “Sintaxes populares” [Popular Syntax] presents the region's calligraphy in multiple contexts; “Nightvision – Mapa do Éden” [Nightvision – Map of Eden] invents a fantastic visuality of Amazonian nature; “O retrato” [The Portrait] denotes different readings of the classical format, in which the environment and surroundings also act as protagonists; while “O antirretrato” [The Anti-Portrait] subverts the classical idea, with an emphasis on details and formal inversions; and “O Marajó” [The Marajó] is the only section with all images in colour and condenses the synthesis of the exhibition, with aspects seen in the previous sets, but stands out for being the territory of the photographer's research in recent years, with an emphasis on the form, light and colour of the archipelago. Starting in Marajó, Luiz Braga systematised a regular practice in his work, focused on listening and orality, interested in the people's stories and popular knowledge, which became the protagonists.

Thinking of the archipelago as a gesture calls for an organic, cyclical, spiral nature, which grasps the territory between different transits and displacements, comings, and goings, permanence and transformations. Luiz Braga's work operates in an instance of living with places, immersing oneself in the dimension of others and in a practice that activates affection as its main gesture. The combination of these factors, together with a photographer who chooses not only to remain in his homeland, but also to make it a place of learning, sharing life and research, delivers to the world a work that is unavoidable both for the construction of an imaginary about this region and for the consolidation of the history of photography in Pará and Brazil.

Bitu Cassundé

The camera has been triggered. The boy's face, caught between time and circumstances, is captured and recorded in eternity in a few thousandths of a second. His deep gaze tells the camera: I see you too. However, unlike the look, the photographic technique puts into the world an image of him that even he does not know. The camera serves as a medium to mediate between the photographer and the “object” photographed, since the act of photography transforms everything into an object. When observing Noite na ladeira I [Night on the Slope I, 1985], one can notice the signs of a presence, a place, a time, in a relationship of power and knowledge about the past that still leads many to believe in photography as capable of capturing reality as it is.

Photography has become an indispensable tool in many fields, including memory, documentation, the arts, identity presentation, and has revolutionised the way people communicate and read the world, but it is also used in violent processes, in the propagation of barbarism, and in the appropriation of the Other, as in war photojournalism. Even the terminology is the same as that used for weapons: to shoot, to capture. It becomes a resource of power when it adheres to practices that historically penalize bodies, races, genders, and stifle territories and subjectivities by generally white and patriarchal gazes. In this sense, the set presents Luiz Braga's choices in the process of approaching alterity, in images pervaded by practices of coexistence, comings and goings, scenes that reveal the photographer as an observer, sometimes participant, sometimes speculative to events.

"My methodology is to visit the places where I photograph countless times, which makes me known and able to know and respect the codes, rhythm and customs of the place." Luiz Braga

The selection presents the relationship between the body and the territory in the formation of the landscape, through scenes of daily riverside life, in the architecture of the stilt houses, in the solitary crossing of the woman on the Transamazônica highway, in childhood in the flooded pastures of the Marajó Island, in the traditional procession of the Círio de Nazaré, and in the military student's walk in Belém. In addition to presenting different horizons of the North region, especially in the state of Pará, Luiz Braga's images show how the human presence creates, elaborates, and transforms territories, constituting different ways of being and inhabiting, the specificities of places and the ways of operating between life and daily routine.

Transits and flows make up significant routes in the formation of the territory we know as the North, such as the rubber cycle during the Second World War (1939-1945), which provided one of the main internal diasporas in Brazil, between the North and the Northeast regions; the proud inauguration in 1972 of the Transamazônica, an unfinished project of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985); and the mining in Serra Pelada in the early 1980s, which configured a gold rush that led thousands of Brazilians to travel to Marabá, in the state of Pará. Such economic cycles reconfigured the landscape through a false idea of modernity and development for the Amazon, through predatory extractivism and epistemicide, resulting in environmental disasters. From the “green hell”, inhospitable, hostile and exotic, inhabited by wild animals, to the “untouched jungle”, which idealizes the Amazon and ignores the millennial actions of indigenous peoples to manage and maintain the forest, stereotypes about the region are part of an exploratory methodology of domination.

A clock hanging on the wall, crossed by wires and dripping marks, freezes the moment inside the coffee factory. The ceramic vessel with artificial flowers bears the inscription “deep waters,” accompanied by the blender, two vases on the crocheted towel: a contemporary still life. The boy adjusts the signal of the television positioned on a towel with fruit prints, while in the background the collecting spirit of someone who owns, stores, and organises objects is revealed: several paintings, the calendar, the clock, flowers, towels, and cables on the wooden slats. Spaces full of objects and the human presence surrounded by them. Objects as an extension of life.

In an archaeology of life, Luiz Braga polishes a set of images that reorganises the perception of the utilitarian, the trivial, which triggers memories, affections and indicates the signature of people in the world. Photography ensures the continuity of an image attributed to the scene, not always the scene itself. In the works, some objects portrayed seem to be from another time, far from the current notion about them, but close enough to be recognised. In other times, the subject of domestic environment was defined as “female art”, while the representation of historical and religious events was considered a male responsibility. Despite the limitations of art, the photographer has developed ways of relationships that allow him to enter the intimacy of houses and shops, observing, welcoming and recording the signs of daily life, indicators of a presence-absence, of past appearances, of a time that happened and remains in the traces of things.

Luiz Braga's career began in advertising, photographing local crafts, tourist landscapes, products and portraits in general. It is during the breaks in his commercial work, between the 1970s and 1990s, that he developed most of the works in the exhibition. The nucleus presents an interest in registering the common professions at the time, such as the recurrent presence of tailors, and even practices linked to aspects specific to the territory, such as fishing and açaí harvesting. In a cartography about the work, he records the performance of popular photographers, with their open-air studios, fundamental to the contemporary imagination of the past, portraitists of the people in a period of intense urban and socio-environmental transformation in the capital of Pará. Crossed by rivers, tributaries, and basins, Belém is a hybrid city, inhabited both by the metropolitan structure, with the presence of an industrial hub, and by the traditional forms of life of the forest, in a not always harmonious coexistence. Sometimes the territory indicates the limits of human action, sometimes such actions shape the space. From the focus on the child in the hairdresser, the rest of the tire repairman, to the women in the fabric factory, Luiz Braga's view captures scenes that contextualize the human authorship of work in times of industrialization. Another aspect is the environments and objects of the professions, through internal, intimate records, in spaces sometimes empty, sometimes occupied.

The set presents traces of everyday calligraphies found in Luiz Braga's archive. It includes popular syntaxes, such as the different ways in which words, signs and typographies structure daily life in the photographed territories, visual resources that contribute to the meaning of life. They are the traces of graffiti on the wall in Montando a barraca [Pitching the Tent] (1985), the circus ads in Broadway Circus (1989), the word that names places, accompanies architecture and frames the woman's face in Bilheteria em Mosqueiro [Ticket Office in Mosqueiro] (1989). In a semiotic perspective, the signs appear not only as texts, but also as bearers of the visual culture of the territory, conserving the aesthetics specific to the various Amazonian calligraphies. In Fátima cabeleireira [Fátima Hairdresser] (1991), the sign on the façade of the establishment accompanies and reinforces the architecture of the building, which refers to the popular modernism of Pará, known as the Raio-que-o-Parta movement, marked by colourful tiles and geometric shapes, such as arrows and spokes, mainly in constructions dated between the 1940s and 1960s, a significant part of the cultural identity of Pará. In the same image, the technical and artistic diversity of the typographies conducted by letter openers stands out: these are professionals organised in schools, that is, masters who have developed styles and apprentices who maintain and replicate this knowledge.

In 2006, during the transition from analogue to digital techniques, Luiz Braga began to investigate the night photography functionality of his camera, first in low-light contexts and then moving to daylight use. As a result, he obtained images in silver-green tones that expanded the chromatic research and marked the construction of a new poetics. The continuing series Nightvision – Mapa do Éden [Nightvision – Map of Eden] elaborates a fantastic visuality about the Amazon, between military green and the nuances of shadows, in which the fiction of colours makes room for narrative inventiveness: surrealism as a refusal to stereotype the territory. 

Created in the late 1920s, the infrared camera was developed for air defence in the UK, but the first use of night vision in the field was by the German army during World War II (1939-1945). The new technology has enabled an unprecedented feat: the extension of time in wars once limited to sunlight. Visualization capacity was exponentially increased by the United States throughout the Vietnam War (1955-1975), but it was not until the Gulf War (1990-1991) that night images reached the world’s imagination, with mass transmission through the media. Currently, night vision is a common feature in the world of electronic games, as well as in the real-time transmission via social networks and smartphones. If the images shock, insofar as they present something new and repetition leads to the naturalization of horror, despite the beneficial uses for life, as in medical technology, night vision allows us to see what should not be seen or exist, multiplying the access and trivialization of human atrocities. In the Nightvision series, the use of night photography is symbolically a reminder of the constant militarism in Brazil, from the recent past of the military dictatorship (1964-1985) to the onslaught of recent years, in addition to the growing international interest in the Amazon.

In a radical generalization of the definition of beauty, Luiz Braga's portraits seem immersed in the humanist sense of valuing ordinary people and everyday deeds. In the early years of photography, the definitions of beauty were linked to the realisation of idealised images. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this notion was challenged by photographers mobilised by the idea that beauty can be found in any subject. In the panorama, the photographic gesture of attributing importance to a subject was marked by a change of referent: from ennobled figures to ordinary citizens, from great deeds to everyday life, from aristocracy to workers and immigrants.

The smiling woman leaning on the bar counter, with the television turned on in the background, freezes the image of Silvio Santos. Grandmother and grandson observe the free market. The deep look of the promise payer carrying her faith on her head. In the works of Luiz Braga, the tension of the classical form of the portrait stands out, marked by the focus on the subject and the neutral background. Thus, the set presents images in which clothes, objects and environments are protagonists with the characters, in a body-architecture relationship. The spaces occupy a significant part of the images and have their own narratives. Characters that reveal the careful sense of composition, with soft shapes carved by the nuances of light in black and white photographs, while colour ones condense the chromatic vibration. The spontaneous expressions of the unbuilt portraits, resulting from the attempt to capture human inwardness, contrast with the serenity of the posed portraits. Scenes that seem to contain different temporalities and situations express the simultaneity of the cinematographic image itself, a source of reference for the artist.

Scenes of concentration, introspection, rest, individual or collective walks at work, moments of observation and contemplation of the horizon make up the core of "The Anti-Portrait". If, in his portraits, Luiz Braga stresses the classical form, showing people with their contexts, in the set of anti-portraits the artist radicalizes this interest through the partial or total dilution of the characters' identities, in images starring the body gesture inserted in the environment. These are photographs that prioritize backlighting, silhouettes, the absence of focus on a single character or the whole scene, and the complete refusal of the main value of traditional portraiture: the cult of the individual. Such procedures challenge and rethink photographic understanding through aesthetic experiments that destabilize orthodox parameters, in a gesture of anti-photography, as in the work Brega in Caraparu (1996). Only a small part of Luiz Braga's photographs are taken from previous combinations, agendas, and scene sketches, but none of the images of the set. In this context, the practice of “peeking” is enhanced by capturing the unexpected, the unpredictable, from the observation of life and the daily life that happens despite the artist.

"Colour opened to me a territory for the popular Amazonian visuality, which originates in the graphic and chromatic wisdom of the ancestral peoples. It is in the seeds, in the feather art, in the colour of fruits, birds, foliage and it is expressed in boats, canoes, façades, bars, trays, prints, etc." Luiz Braga

The photographer's phrase refers to the period in the 1980s when he encountered the colours present in the riverside areas of the capital of Pará. However, it easily fits Luiz Braga's perception of the Marajó Island, a field of investigation since 2006. The archipelago is an explosion of colours, a territory full of symbolism that suggests time for cautious observation, from the geometry of the houses to the scarlet ibis, birds of an unmistakable red. The only nucleus entirely in colour, it presents the photographer's latest production, in which the equatorial light raises the chromatic vibration present in highlighted scenes of Marajoara daily life. In most cases, these are situations that can only be seen and carried out through contact with people from the territory, such as the presentation of the marching band in Porta-bandeira e ônibus [Flag Bearer and Bus] (2018), entering the sensory house, in Interior lilás [Violet Interior] (2015), or understanding the functions of curtains and fabrics in the decoration and organization of internal environments, as in Interior casa Gerlane, movimento II [Inside Gerlane's House, Movement II] (2024).

A territory full of stories and ancestry, immersed in the indigenous knowledge that governs the cuisine, the language, the mythology of the region, the knowledge of life in symbiosis with nature, Marajó is the cradle of prehistoric ceramics in Brazil, loaded with symbolism that makes up a complex system of visual communication, organised in stages of production. Black resistance continues to be present in the local quilombos (maroons), such as the community of Gurupá, in Cachoeira do Arari, and Pau Furado, in Salvaterra.

8th Floor

3E - Among the 258 works in the exhibition, 150 were printed by the Laboratory of Historical Photographic Processes of Instituto Moreira Salles, in Rio de Janeiro, the division responsible for perpetuating the practice of enlarging photographic negatives. The enlarging of a negative consists in projecting it on a photosensitive paper, which will later be developed, interrupted and fixed, these being some of the steps of analogue printing. The images are then photofinished, flattened, and retouched before being released. The work carried out by the IMS team is intended to make this knowledge accessible to the public in the exhibitions.

3E - Since the 1980s, Luiz Braga's research has taken place simultaneously, between black and white and colour, both during the intervals of commercial work and in the photographer's daily life. A milestone in this process is Babá Patchouli [Patchouli Nanny], 1986, shot during a family trip. Initially perceived as a mistake, after months it became the starting point for research with colour temperatures between daylight and artificial light, mercury vapour light and tungsten light. The research that followed was awarded by Boston University in 1990 and became a trademark of the photographer's production, leading to the development of works such as Barqueiro azul in Manaus [Blue Boatman in Manaus], 1992 (see nucleus "The Portrait").

3D - In 1996, photographer Luiz Braga and journalist Dorrit Harazim produced the report “Mulheres em marcha” [Women on the March], which followed the daily lives of perfume and cosmetics retailers in the northern region of Brazil. These women travelled by boat, on buffalo, between islands and along roads, to deliver customer orders. The article presents a network of female cooperation and entrepreneurship, alternative ways to achieve autonomy, self-esteem, and a yearning for a better life. Published in Veja magazine, the photograph Mulher na Transamazônica [Woman at the Transamazônica] (1996) was highlighted on the subject.

7D - The presence of portraits and scenes of photographers in Luiz Braga's archive corresponds to the interest in registering the workers responsible for the popular portraits and tourist records that made photography accessible in people's daily lives. They were the first and only records of many families at that time. It was also from these professionals that he received answers to his questions and tips at the beginning of his interest in photography.

8B - In Luiz Braga's production, the photographer calls “portal images” works that reveal indications that open paths of investigation, even if they are carried out from previous desires, or unexpectedly and spontaneously. Fé em Deus [Faith in God], 2006, is the portal image of the series Nightvision – Mapa do Éden [Nightvision – Map of Eden], the work that indicated the general characteristics for the continuity of research with night photography.

7th Floor

10D/10E - In 1992 Luiz Braga was invited to take commissioned photographs for the Arte Amazonas workshop, on the occasion of the II United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Eco-92, in Rio de Janeiro. He travelled to Manaus to carry out the work and it was in a fishing colony that he met Antônio Laborda, who gave life to the famous photograph Barqueiro Azul in Manaus [Blue Boatman in Manaus], 1992. Years later, Luiz Braga met a woman. Laborda's granddaughter told the photographer that she had seen the photo during a trip, recognised her grandfather and informed Luiz that it might be the last picture of Antônio in life.

11d - More than the isolation of external light, the curtains of the houses in Marajó separate rooms as versatile and colourful doors; they create textures and colour the walls, like paintings that can be quickly changed or overlapped; they are light filters that allow different degrees of luminosity, altering the perception of environments throughout the day; they are dancing ghosts that overflow fluidity and movement to spaces.