This essay is an analysis of current photography in Brazil that finds its production vigorous and diverse with a historical basis that brings to light its maturity. The author, Tadeu Chiarelli, begins the study with the most successful trio of Brazilians on the international scene: Rosangêla Rennó, Mário Cravo Neto, and Sebastião Salgado. It is the combination of them with which he can classify this production, although each one of them exemplifies a different tendency in the nation’s artistic scene. Rennó deals in “photography of appropriation,” Cravo Neto in “documentary or signature photography,” and Salgado with the tradition of photojournalism that deals with social criticism. Beyond these specific paths, Brazilian photography proposes other channels and means between the autonomous and the two-dimensional image, as well as the use of objects and installations. There is reciprocity between registering identity and the search for an aesthetic formalism that verges on abstraction. Putting aside a crucial interest in the aesthetic and sociological, Chiarelli emphasizes how photography was imposed on the art scene during the 1980s, and explains that “the artistic nature of a work of art is not given by the method chosen to perform that function.”

Tadeu Chiarelli is a curator and the current director of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.He is also an author in the field of photography and a curator of photography of nineteenth- and twentieth century Brazilian art. In his research, he established ties between art and photography within the art world, emphasizing social organizations. Chiarelli has played a fundamental role in disseminating photography as a mainstay of the national artistic production in recent decades.

[For further reading, please refer to the ICAA digital archive for the following texts written by Tadeu Chiarelli: “15 artistas brasileiros: colocando dobradiças na arte contemporânea” (1110500), “Amanhã hoje: Casa triângulo de 1988 a 1995” (1111344), “Apontamentos para um mapa das artes plásticas em São Paulo durante 1985” (1111351),“Apropriações: o lugar da arte como questão” (1111252), “Armadilhas para Narciso” (1111253), “Considerações sobre o uso de imagens de segunda geração na arte contemporânea” (1110502), “Da arte nacional brasileira para a arte brasileira internacional” (1075144), “Emmanuel Nassar: erudito e popular” (1110457), “A gravura no espelho” (1111250), “A gravura paulista significa” (1111251), “Jac Leirner” (1111254), “La mirada contaminada: otras fotografias = The contaminated gaze: other photographies” (1110893), “Realidade e simulacro” (1111255), “Uma realidade... dilacerante: a produção de Nazareth Pacheco = Nazareths’s Pacheco output: a lacerating reality” (1111059), “Sobre a fotografia brasileira atual = On current Brazilian photography” (1110895), “Sobre as pinturas de Mônica Nador” (1111256), and “O tridimensional na arte brasileira dos anos 80 e 90: genealogias, superações” (1111352)].