This text is a critical review of the exhibition Novíssimos: a produção dos 90, held at the Galeria Fotóptica in São Paulo in 1993. Margot Pavan’s comments on the exhibition hark back to the accomplishments of the nineteenth-century Swedish photographer Oscar Gustav Rejlander (1813–75). Opposing the prevailing prejudice that photography was merely a mechanical and impersonal record, Rejlander sought to demonstrate that it was an art form with photomontages of up to thirty-five different negatives. In turn, Pavan points out that the collected works of photography produced in the 1990s shown in São Paulo range between two poles: on the one hand, selective tactics, and on the other, combinatorial strategies. The tactics include framing, scenic compositions, illumination, and a focus on public figures. On the other hand, the strategies entail piling up manipulated images, whether this is done in the darkroom (scratching, superimposing, repeating, inverting, and photocomposing) or by using photographs in a variety of unconventional media. The selective tactics and the combinatorial strategies caused a rupture with the traditional segmentation of languages (photo object, photo installation). 

The exhibition reviewed by Margot Pavan was part of the event “Panoramas da Imagem,” held at the Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS) in São Paulo. The photography exhibitions in the event were: Na Falta da Verdade,curated by Eduardo Brandão at the Galeria Casa Triângulo, and Homem-Sanduiche, curated by José Fujocka, which brought together sixteen performance artists in the main streets of the city for six days. Each of the sixteen wore two posters (“sandwich [boards]”) with images of their work on the front and back, as if they were vendors walking around advertising their services.

Margot Pavan has a master’s degree in art from Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA-USP). She teaches postgraduate courses in “Hipermídia e Interatividade,” as well as “Produção Cultural Online” at the Centro Universitário Belas Artes. She also manages digital media development (a Web portal) for Editora Abril. In 1996, she was part of the team that launched the portal Universo on Line (UOL) for the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. Pavan is in charge of a project to organize a database of two million images kept by the daily newspaper Última Hora in the São Paulo State Archive. This database will establish a context for modern Brazilian photojournalism.