LUIZ BRAGA AND OPAQUE PHOTOGRAPHY

By TADEU CHIARELLI
Toque-toque Grande – SP, 2005

With his essay Photography, featured in issue n. 49/50 of the journal Camera Work , U.S. photographer Paul Strand seeks to set early 20th-century photography apart from the painting and printing traditions that informed the pictorialist movement of that time. For photography to reach its ultimate purity, photographers should invest in what supposedly constituted their specific ingredient, i.e. objectivity, or the ability to capture the real whit maximum accuracy. In Photography, the author suggests that photography might secure its place in the art world if only its producers placed emphasis on those requirements.

This is not to say that Strand explicitly stated that photography was to become another artistic medium, or that it should bring out its singularity and assert itself as an additional artistic modality. This author goes as far as to suggest that to ponder photography as an art form (or not) would be to put forth a false true, something that in fact is unimportant.

Yet a more careful reading of Photography implicitly reveals Strand´s objective of establishing a clear place for photography within the field of modern art that in those days was being set up. To this end, the author proposed a few strategies:

To begin, as we have mentioned, Strand claimed for photography, exclusively, the objective capture of the real. In so doing, he removed other institutionalized artistic modalities – conventional painting and printing (even those of Impressionist nature) and pictorialist photography itself (which was equally influenced by Impressionism) – from the plateau in which they had been placed.

Then, without ever clearly enunciating his aim, and yet unequivocally, Strand drew his concept of photography – “direct” photography, which supposedly only engages objectivity in face of the real – near a concept of modern art that in those days was growing stronger, and that requested that each type of art put emphasis on their respective specificities.

Strand´s proposals introduced a complex issue in that to link photography´s specificity to its “objectivity” is not exactly to seek for specifics in something inherent to it, but in the referent, which is always inside and outside photography.

After all, and precisely because of its objectivity, the photographic image of a dog holds a close relation to the dog that served as model for the photograph. Given this fact, what specificity are we talking about?

Possibly the awareness of the photographic sign´s ambiguity accounts for the fact that, at a given poin in his essay, the author indicated two ways for the photographer to organize and transform the objectivity of photography into a method. He wrote, “…the objects [to be captured by the photographer] may be organized to express the causes of which they are the effects, or they may be used as abstract forms to create an emotion unrelated to the objectivity as such.”

While proposing these two possibilities that were basically antagonistic, on the one hand Strand was acknowledging photography as a medium that expresses in direct manner that which reflects (or reproduces) from the world, supposedly free of interference; on the other hand, he was opening a space in which photography, beginning from the capture of worldly things – and through abrupt sectioning – , was to create new visual realities that supposedly were unrelated to portrayed elements.

Viewed as a radical and yet fundamentally conciliatory medium, straight photography (as Paul Strand´s bipolar methos was named) was definitely aligned with the entire realistic tradition of Western art – a tradition present in painting as well as in the other artistic modalities, from the first Renaissance to Gustave Coubert´s realistic movement. On the other hand, it was affiliated to the early nonfigurative 20th-century painting that placed emphasis on the two dimensionality of the picture plane as well as on the plane´s structural elements (lines, dots), while attempting to build an art that was not exactly abstract, but concrete and nonrepresentational.

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Actually, these two proposals emerged in the United States, in the early 20th century, as immediate products of a certain type of photography with which Strand was dealing in his double role of producer and audience. While seeking to overcome the obstacles brought upon by pictorialism, this photography looked to developing itself in a manner less bound by tradition, and to securing its own organized place.

Whether or not they were conciliatory or radical, the fact is that these two paths that Strand proposed slowly stretched out into the world and reviewed as two possibilities for the so-called pure modern photography.

In this internationalization process, both types of Straight photography gradually joined other manifestations then in progress in several countries, on the margin of traditional photography (be it the pictorial type or the type conditioned by the demands of conventional portraiture).

The first source “direct” photography merged more or less successfully (depending n the photographer´s skills) with documentary – journalistic, anthropological, social, etc – photography, often been mistaked with the very concept of “photography” and even on “art”.

The second source, in turn, was exposed to greater risk. Contrarily to what Strand wished to proposed, this photography hardly managed to “create an emotion unrelated to the objectivity as such.” This difficulty occurs, to a large extent, because, because of the strong link established between image and its referent. Its “base” objectivity is so extreme that, when viewing the majority of “abstract” photos, once can hardly keep from distinguishing – or at least inquiring on – “what” is the image and “where” it has been registered, no matter how sectioned it may have been.

It is possibly in “abstract” photography´s inability to rid itself completely from the referent that its limit lies; and hence, precisely, its attractiveness. After all, no matter how much its author tries to extract from image any possible reference whit he portrayed project, one can always verify that an apparently abstract image is actually the shade of a pergola viewed from an angle that makes difficult to grasp the original context of that image; or it is a set of wash basins arranged side by side, and so on.

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When looking at a photograph, we tend to oscillate between the reality of the image and the reality it conveys. No matter how old the photo may be, or how barely we know its referent, or yet how abstract it may be, or how barely we know its referent, or yet how its referent, or yet hw abstract it may be, ts transparency – that which allows the viewer to discern the referent has spawned it “through” its materiality – usually tends to prevail.

What would a photograph be like that imposed itself and its singularity, setting obstacles for immediate interrelations between itself as an object endowed with a certain materiality and physical-chemical makeup, and the referent that originated it? Would it be simply by “abstracting” the photograph´s context, placing emphasis on details, and de-contextualizing objects?

Would there not be other disturbing procedures of this transparency intended to govern photography as an inherent datum?

When was photography to become opaque, coming forth as a valid visual reality in itself rather than only as a medium, i.e., as a means to arrive to the referent?

How could we define this “opaque” photography?

Would it be possible to ponder opacity of, and in photography while emphasizing of exploring certain visual and technical characteristics that eventually would yield images impregnated with internal noises, which in turn would hinder and eventually get in the way of the initial transparency?

The notions of transparency and opacity to which I refer here in this text developed from U.S. historian Rosalind Krauss´s survey of 20th-century sculpture.

Modern sculpture set precise indexes of materiality and of its own makeup against the “transparency” of initial sculpture , thereby forcing the viewer to grasp the significance of the art work out of its own physical framework, rather than “through it.” Thus, while positioning itself against “transparency” and the role of a leading to ideal beauty (both of which are attributes of traditional sculpture), modern sculpture proposed its “opaque” disposition, becoming at once means and end in and of itself, even if its form made reference to a “truth” that preceded its renditions (the human body, for example)

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A photographer that emphasized certain aspects of its own constitution or process, or that caused the surfacing elements intrinsic to its actual framework – hence operating as formative elements of image -, could be viewed as an “opaque” photograph – a photograph whose unmistakable constitutive sign become just as important or even more so than the supportive elements of its referential character.

A photograph thus constituted – whether it be of documentary or “abstract” character – allows the pondering of the concept of photography beyond the parameters of traditional photography as well as of the two photography styles that Paul Strand and his followers set forth.

The photography that Luiz Braga has produced in the last 30 years provides an exemplary standpoint from which to reflect on issues now being brought up.

An analysis of Braga´s photo production clearly reveals the two sources that Strand propounded, namely anthropological/documentary photography and “abstract”/”abstractive” photography. Whithin this context, in the past few decades the artist has been developing a one of the most interesting poetics in the realm of Brazilian photography.

However, both his “anthropological” photographs and his “abstract” photographs, no matter how sophisticated and formally attractive they may seem, boast the aforementioned character of transparency that by and large distinguishes the photography we know. This characteristic does not lessen the significance of these two types of work; rather, they expand and reinstate the concept of photography that Paul Strand ushered in 1917, and to a large extend update it while using it to keenly capture the physical and human landscapes of northeastern Brazil. Notwithstanding, along the course of Braga´s photo production there are some quite proficuous instances of overcoming Strand´s dichotomous concept.

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A history of photography in Brazil – and one in the process of becoming – should neither be constructed only on biographical essays nor on the analysis of the purported specificities of this medium; no should it constitute a branch of the history of art viewed basically as the evolution of styles (even the current evolution that contributes to the country´s formation). On the contrary, such a history should represent part of a knowledge field that is of consequence for the understanding of Brazil´s visual culture and/or its diverse regions which ultimately would expand its aesthetic and social reach.

On the differences between the history of traditional art and a history of art focused on a broader concept of visual culture, scholar Svetlana Alpers brought up some rather pertinent issues when she made assumptions for her study of Dutch painting. She wrote:

“Even the most naïve viewer can see much continuity in northern art from Van Eyck to Vermeer, and I shall often look back from the 17th century to similar phenomena in earlier northern works. But no history on the developmental model of Vasari has ever been written, nor do I think it could be. This is because the art did not constitute itself as progressive tradition. It did not make a history in the sense that art did in Italy. For art to have a history in this Italian sense is the exception, not the rule. Most artistic traditions mark what persists and is sustaining , not what is changing, in culture. What propose to study then is not the history of Dutch art, but the Dutch visual culture (…).”

To think the oeuvre of Luiz Braga along lines that extend beyond biography and the concept of style evolution – while seeking to understand it within the complex visual culture of its time – is to pursue the objective of experimenting with the potential building of a history of photography in Brazil under a viewpoint that is less in conformity with predictable formulations.

The respective productions of photographers, moviemakers and artists with whom Luiz Braga entered dialogues during his formative years – David Drew Zingg, Luiz Trípolo, Maureen Bislliat, Frederico Fellini, and Edward Hopper, for example – were just as significant and influential for him as the output of others whose names and works he cannot recall. Braga chose to explore a medium, namely photography, which does not come forth as a form of knowledge that one acquires in museums or specialized schools as traditionally is the case with painting and other so-called highbrow artistic forms.

The object of the “photographic gaze” is captured and created by individuals who live in a society of images, one in which practically all information is either an image of something associated with the image.

In 1956, when Braga was born, technical imaging already belonged in the everyday life of people in general. For more than a century, t had been an element of visual culture in most parts of the world.

Even in a “peripheral” society such as that of Belém, photography was being vigorously disseminated through advertising, photojournalism, studio photographs, and publications produced in southeastern Brazil and abroad. Side-by-side with this overwhelming presence of still photographs, the film and television pieces produced in that some period contributed to further expand the visual complexity in wich Luiz Braga rooted his poetics.

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If we were to look for a moment only at the field of photography, we would realize that pros such as Zingg, Bisilliat, and others who became nationally known for their work featured in Realidade (a monthly news magazine published from 1966 through 1976) most certainly informed Braga’s sensibility. After all, for anyone who took an interest in photography in Brazil in the mid-1970s, Realidade was a true photography school, a mixture of photojournalism and authorial photography to be adopted as frame of reference.

Yet, it was not the only frame. Whether or not Braga was aware of it, other people and productions influenced his work, namely the amateur members of the Cine-foto Clube de Belém [Belém Film and Photo Club]; the photo features in local newspapers; the photos published in weekly magazines O Cruzeiro and Manchete, photo calendar illustrations; advertising billboard photos; studio photographs; family snapshots, and even pictures by less known photographers engaged in social and political photography who documented poverty in Brazil, particularly in the northern region.

This was the universe of multiple references in which Luiz Braga was to travel back and forth among several different types of photography, at first without pledging to constitute a precise and predictable evolutionist line for his work.

On the other hand, we should bear in mind that Luiz Braga the authorial photographer coexists side-by-side with Luiz Braga the advertising photographer, the studio photographer, and the fashion photographer. No matter how similar there roles and their respective activities may appear to be, the fact is that they are played by a same artist, a same personality; therefore, eventual interchanges among the different fields are only natural.

To view authorial photography as being totally detached from the social and professional reality of its author is to risk veering toward the construction of a “heroic” history of photography based on the myth of the artist-photographer who is disconnected on purpose and often in a romantic and falsely rebellious manner from the reality of the market in which he works and subsists.

In all these working as an authorial photographer and combining the different types of knowledge acquired in other areas of professional photographs, anthropological color pictures, and others. Even in we consider that for a number of years the artist has been mostly engaged in color photography, taking for his subjects the Amazonian riverside population and their rainforest environment, the modes of photography mentioned in the previous paragraph did not always take place in a sequence; in fact, they were often concurrent.

Any pondering on Braga’s production must look to an evolutionist concept of art as keynote. This photographer did not go from “figurative” to “abstract”, from “documentary” photography to “formalist” photography, or yet from a more “traditional” photography to a more “current” photography. To mature as a pro is not to tread only a single track in search for “purity’ of form or of whatever other element of photography.

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By and large, the influential sources that mostly attract the attention of critics to the authorial photography of Luiz Braga are precisely those liable to be compared with the sources of straight photography that Paul Strand put forth.

Braga’s “abstract” photographs feature the keen appeal found in that type of “incapability” or difficulty of photography to rid itself from the referent.

Among other titles, Camburões coloridos [Color vessels], Porta com cadeado [Door and padlock], Bilharito, Barca dos Milagres [Miracle boat] and Som nacional [National sound] at once reflect the abstract-geometric painting structures that came up in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Overall, the initial emphasis placed on monochrome surfaces, on the modular nature of some compositions, and on industrial colors refers to that highbrow, rigorous realm.

However, the informalism observed in modular sequences, certain geometric “incorrections”, and the unchecked use of color contributed to shift the frame of references from these photos to the development of a geometric-constructive traditional in Brazil as from the mid 1950s. Here I refer specifically to any possible connections of these photos with the Neo-concrete production as well as with works by independent artist who adhered to constructive ideas.

Yet the direct relation between photographs and constructive tradition (even the Neo-Concrete and the offbeat traditions) cannot hide de referents from which they originated. They are all segments and “abstractions” of the Amazonian riverside environment. They point out, denounce, and document, while a the same time abstracting, the free use of geometry and gaudy colors preferred by that local population in their decorative painting of façades, objects, interiors etc.

Taking highbrow references (i.e., the constructive traditions we have mentioned) as well as popular references, the artist resorts to Srand’s second methodology for capturing the real to render his visual commentaries on the surrounding reality. While segmenting and abstracting reality, and at the same time emphasizing the rich geometry produced by the population of northern Brazil, Braga even unconsciously repeats, expands, and actualizes straight photography’s visual system. In turn, this visual system derives, though in non-declared manner, from that same abstract-geometric painting.

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It must be said that the photographer’s complex matrix of references contains not only the above-mentioned elements, but also the painting by his peer Emmanuel Nassar. Working concomitantly with the photographer, this painter features in his canvases the same popular decorations of their home territory. And the referent is not only thing they share.

Beginning n the mid-1980s, that is to say, the same time period in which Braga produced his “abstract” photographs, Naasar executed abstract-geometric paintings that not only emulate the typical segmentation and framing of abstract straight photography, but also draw from elements that closely resemble the European geometric-constructive painting tradition as well as that of southeastern Brazil.

As early as in those days, Nassar and Braga were friends and mainsprings of the Belém cultural environment; furthermore, they both found in the visual culture of the Pará riverside population the foremost inspiration for their respective productions. Whether or not they were aware of it, they drew from the representational scheme of Paul Strand’s “abstract” modern photographer and a painter to reflect on and expand a regional visuality – a visuality that is prone to be observed and commented, not in a narrative, but in descriptive manner – by resorting to schemes employed in “abstract” rather than “realist” photography and painting?

Would it possible to consider that in Pará painting and photography the adoption of Strand’s schemes of “abstract” photography meant a real transformation in the way of pondering and expanding the visual richness of northern Brazil?

On the other hand, to what extent did the Amazonian visuality rendered into the production of these two artists – one that overcame the hurdles of regionalism and entered the broader field of Brazilian art – induce this same field to a self-criticism on the significance of modern art canons in the Brazilian art scene?

Yet another question is opportune: to what extent would the production of Braga and Nassar as well as that of other artists that introduces a discreetly sophisticated taste for decorative geometric compositions executed by the Brazilian population have fulfilled the expectations of part of Brazil’s intellectual circles in terms of “verifying” the “popular roots” of highbrow art of geometric-constructive tradition?

To delve deeper into these questions is to put emphasis on the study of art as something that reaches beyond the merely formal issue.

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Regardless of how difficult it may be to clearly perceive what objects the artist’s gaze has segmented, Braga’s “abstract” photographs will always feature a light that attests to their origin. This tropical light that evenly shines on his pictures is meant to bring out the texture and superficial aspects of the captured scenes and, at the same time, comply with the image’s planar character.

In these photos, no matter how hard the author may have tried to make difficulties for or even to suppress their recognition, the referents are always present and connected to the resulting image, thus emphasizing the revealing nature of photographic image.

These pictures are also rather “transparent.” Above all, it is through light and the contrasting, vivid colors that we learn that they double as commentaries and render a precise space/time, i.e., the visuallity of northern Brazil.

The same homogeneous lighting that shines on and brightens the local environment seems to provide the keynote for some of Braga’s photographs. Unconcerned with abstracting the context from which he captures any given detail, the photographer builds scenes featuring the local folk, in which the prevailing organization of objects “reveals the causes that have produced them.” In photos such as Menina em Santarém [Girl in Santarém], Garçonete do Ver-o-Peso, [Waitress at Ver-o-Peso], Rapaz e cão. Carananduba [Youth and dog. Carananduba], Vendedor de Amendoim [Peanut vendor] and Interior, and Loja de plásticos no Ver-o-Peso [Plastics shop at Ver-o-Peso], for example, scenes boast an unstinting, homogeneous lighting and thus reiterate a certain melancholy on the part of forlorn-looking portrayed subjects.

However, if on the one hand the geometry of the photo field is not obviously structured in these photographs)the geometry is given by the portrayed object, such as in Bilharito, for example), on the other hand it presents itself subtly in the planar conjugation within the picture rectangle, with crossed vertical and horizontal lines forming grids that go nearly indiscernible to a distracted gaze. Yet, these lines structure the better part of scenes captured by the artist’s camera.

It is precisely the rigor of these vertical and horizontal lines (at times disrupted by insinuating diagonals) in conjunction with the tranquility and ease with which the majority of subjects surrender to the camera lens that confer on them touches of Ingres, or classical Picasso (Vendedor de Amendoim), a more timid Matisse (Rapaz e cão. Carangaduba), or even Di Cavalcanti (Rita no arraial).

In his work, Braga develops and expands the “realist” tradition of Paul Strand’s straight photography and, in causing its premises to overflow, comes face-to-face with pictorial tradition, while still remaining straight – thereby revealing the extent to which the relations between painting and photography must be productive.

With these photographs, combined with those we have mentioned before, Luiz Braga assumes his place as one the principal Brazilian photographers of his generation.

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The silent and even solemn character of these photos by Luiz Braga acquires an even more dramatic tone in the black-and-white photo portraits he made in the earliest part of his career.

Although at present the artist oscillates between photography as ethnic-anthropological document and as instrument for capturing snapshots from everyday life, in works such as Cortando o bacuri or Oleiro, for example, they play of light and shade is emphasized and utilized as a key element of the image. Perhaps this resource could be understood as deriving from certain traces of a rhetoric commonly found in the photojournalism that, up until the 1970s and 1980s, keenly insisted it portraying in somewhat heroic manner the living conditions of Brazil’s underprivileged population.

As typical works done n the early part of Luiz Braga’s career, the black-and-white photos reveal the artist’s ability to bring together subject and surroundings, in an atmosphere that seemingly attempts to transcend everyday events in search of another reality.

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In view of all the facets of Luiz Braga’s authorial production – namely his black-and-white and color “abstract” photographs -, we could affirm that the artist has appropriated, reiterated, and actualized in his work the ideas posed by Paul Strand. Yet, there is another group of photographs produced by the artist that seemingly reach beyond the propositions of modern photography.

Even while nurturing a same interest in the physical and in the human landscape of northern Brazil, and also a same compositional structure – always dominated by lines that from the image-supporting planes and grids -, Braga modifies the nature of some of his photographs, making them totally different from the above mentioned ones.

In photos such as Lona Azul [Blue canvas] Janela do rio Guamá [windown on the Guamá River] or Pipoqueiro [popcorn vendor], for example, he problematizes the direct relation between image and its referent. Something in this binominal opposition seems obstructed thus jeopardizing the transparency of image, or in other words, its traditional characteristic of functioning as he channel between observer and the image referent.

In these photos, certain colors and hues are excessively intense; they can be even embarrassing in their ability to assume their differences and shift the tradition of straight photography as translator of world reality to image reality.

The light cast on the models of Babá patchouli [Nanny and boy on the beach] in not the light of northern Brazil. It is a light that reaches beyond the naturalist light of direct photography. All at once, as we observe that apparently naturalist scene, we realize that it could be the image of a dream, a premonition, but never the prosaic and “faithful” rendition of a woman or a child seen from the back. There is more to this image than meets the eye: rather than denouncing the fact that photo subjects were giving their backs to Luiz Braga’s camera, the colors involving those subjects suggest an allegory of future, a becoming, something that perhaps only that child will ever get to experience.

In turn, Lona Azul seems to be more than just a recording of a type of tent shelter used in northern Brazil. Here the vigorous colors, the antinaturalism of the blue, yellow, and red tones contrast with documentary attributes, depriving the image from its role of conveyor of a meaning that is external to it or, at least, hindering this flow as much as possible.

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These photos are contaminated by the subversion of industrial prescriptions on the most appropriate film for a given type of light or time of day, and committed to the inquisitive character of their author, who is not only concerned with what to capture but also with how to capture it. They have blotched their relations with the immediate referent, thereby jeopardizing the indexing and iconic characteristics of photography. Opaque and pregnant with non-real colors and hues that only occur on the surface of photofraphic paper, these photos by Luiz Braga assume symbolical and even allegorical dimensions that remove them from any immediate notation.

In this sense, starting from a course proposed by Strand, Braga’s photographs have to read a different path, thus demonstrating that photography can be and actually is more than a document and more than the assertion of its direct dependency on the referent.

With these photos, the artist reaches beyond straight photography, and this is why some observers experience frustration upon coming face-to-face with them. Before these autonomous works, anyone who seeks the “northern colors”, for example, will find the “colors of Luiz Braga’s photography.” In other words, a self-referent reality that enjoys total independence as a work of art situated many leagues away from any restrictive documentary boundaries.

[1] STAND, Paul. Photography; “´Photography”. In Alfred Stieglitz; Camera Work: The complete illustrations 1903-1917. Köln: Taschen, 1997, p. 780-781.

[2]Given the first artistic movement created within the environment of photography, pictorialism sought to confer on photography the status of a “fine art”. To this end, it disclaimed some of the principal singularities of this medium – the instant character, reproducibility, easy access to devices, etc. – through the use of techniques and manual procedures in the production of the final image. The movement inaugurated in the second half of the 19th century in Europe resounded in Brazil in about the mid-1950s.

[3]In painting, he planar nature; in sculpture, the volume, and so on.
[4] I am not referring to the kind of abstract photography produced through the manipulation of photograms, for example. Here I refer to a type of photography that, while “clipping” certain elements from reality and framing them through a direct method, momentarily disrupt the relation between object and its representation, thereby coming forth as “abstract” photography. In this type of work, in principal what counts – or should count – are the relations between planes, forms, color hues, etc.

[5]By and large, on account of its being very closely related to reality, this type of photography was to incorporate the concept of photography itself, with photography playing the role of “reproducer” of the real. Given that the role of art is often viewed as one of reproducing the real, many people regard this type of photography as an art form. In this sense, the words of Charles Baudelaire come in handy: As far as painting and sculpture are concerned, the current credo of the sophisticated public, above all in France… is this: I believe in Nature, and I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature… Thus and industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art. A vengeful God has granted the wishes of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the public says to itself: Since photography give us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the idiots!), then photography and Art are the same thing.” BAUDELAIRE, Charles, 1859 Salon Review, quoted in SCHARF, Aaron, Art and Photography. London: Penguin Books, 1968, p. 145.

[6]KRAUSS, Rosalind E. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1989.