This text was the introduction to the exhibition Fotografia Contemporânea do Pará - Novas Visões, held in Rio de Janeiro (Fundação Nacional de Artes - Funarte) as well as at Niterói (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), both in 1998. The two exhibitions brought together the work of seven artists from the Amazon State of Pará who were involved in the expansion of the limits of photography beyond the more traditional field of the documental record. The Brazilian curators Ângela Magalhães, Nadja Peregrino and Paulo Máttar set their exhibition in the expanding milieu of photography that was nourished in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, these exhibitions fit into a continuum linked to other exhibitions that were examining the transformation. Other events worth mentioning are: The I Fotonorte and the IV Semana Nacional de Fotografia (which, in 1985, took the region’s photographic work into the national sphere, guaranteeing it a distinguished role); a 1995 exhibition held as a tribute to the photographer and educator Miguel Chikaoka; the II Fotonorte; and even the launching of the book Amazônia – Olhar sem Fronteiras, in 1997.

The exhibition catalogue presents critical essays on the contemporary photography produced in the State of Pará (through which the Amazon River flows to its mouth). The essays place this work in the context of the photography created in the 1990s under the tentative names of “constructed photography” or “manipulated photography.” What was significant here was the effort made by this exhibition to point out the importance of the work done by the Grupo Caixa de Pandora. The origins of this group go back to the beginnings of that key decade with the organization of several exhibitions that led to the formation of the group Caixa de Pandora - Núcleo de Imagens. In addition to critical essays written by the writers about each artist, the exhibition catalogue tells of the relationships between them and the other artists who made up the photographic universe of that northern Brazilian State at the time. 

A number of critics, curators and art historians were interested in the art produced in Brazil’s Amazon region from the 1990s into the early 2000s. Among the outstanding essays and articles they wrote are the essay “Mameluquices e cabanagens,” by Paulo Herkenhoff, published in the catalogue, XI Salão Arte Pará (Belém: Fundação Rômulo Maiorana, 1992) [see doc. no. 1111170]; a text by Cláudio de La Rocque Leal, published in O Rosto e os Outros (Belém: Bonnie & Clyde, 1995); the article “Visualidade na Amazônia: a questão da fotografia,” by Magalhães and Peregrino (two of the curators of this exhibition), published in the journal Imagens, No. 7 (Campinas, May-August 1996) [doc. no. 1111176]; an essay by the well-known professor Benedito Nunes, “Amazônia Reinventada,” published in the exhibition catalogue for the II Fotonorte, Amazônia – Olhar sem fronteiras (Belém: Funarte, 1998); and finally, the essay “Fotografia Paraense: Militância Política e Dissonância Poética,” by Rubens Fernandes Júnior, published in Fotografia contemporânea paraense: panorama 80/90, organized by Mariano Klautau Filho (Belém: SECULT, 2002) [doc. no. 1111168].