Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Written by Harumi Yamagishi, this overview of photography in the twentieth century was the presentation of the exhibition Foto/Idéia held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo (MAC-USP) in 1982. Yamagishi asserts that photography as a [...]

Lenora de Barros offers three alternative perspectives on the redefinition (or the semantics) of the photographic image. (1) She juxtaposes Susan Sontag’s interpretation of the photographic scene (repetition and time saturates and wears down the [...]

[This text offers] perspective on Amazonian sensibility, through which the author proposes a radical shift by marginalizing the “elitist” focus. According to this vision, the history of the cultural production of that region has been “a tragic [...]

Using a good series of literary metaphors, Cláudio de La Roque Leal presents the photographic work produced by Cláudia Leão during the mid-1990s. He considers it a visual reflection on the perennial character of images and their connection to [...]

Based on the events of 1981, this newspaper article comments on the cultural environment in the city of Belém (Estado de Pará), which is located in the Amazonian equatorial region of Brazil. While on the one hand the visual arts and music were not [...]

This essay describes the establishing of the photography club Foto Clube do Pará, naming its founding partners, the activities presented, and the postal addresses of its members. Around the mid-1950s, in the state capital of Belém, they opened a [...]

This essay by Orlando Maneschy emphasizes the importance of Gratuliano Bibas to photography from the Brazilian state of Pará. Maneschy places Bibas’s work in historical context in relation to the presence of North American photographer Charles [...]

This essay introduces I FotoNorte, the exhibition held in equatorial Belém, in the state of Pará. The show consisted of a selection of photographs of the Brazilian Amazon taken as part of a larger project sponsored by the Instituto Nacional de [...]

In this presentation of his research, Rubens Fernandes Júnior attempts to provide an overview of photography from the state of Paraná in southern Brazil, placing it in wider historical and geographic context. The author not only summarizes the most [...]

This text by writer Benedito Nunes is a comparison of two works, both of them urban scenes from his collection: a painting by Emmanuel Nassar and a photograph by Gratuliano Bibas. Drawing on the author’s background in philosophy, the text is a [...]

In this critical overview of the work of Farnese de Andrade—an artist from Minas Gerais—Arlindo Daibert examines the origins and sources of production that ceaselessly attempt to combine opposing elements. In his text, Daibert pays particular [...]

In this brief essay, Arlindo Daibert asserts that Western art is patently masculine. In a few lines, he expresses the idea that there is a gender division in art whereby “the masculine” governs the field of production and “the feminine” the [...]

In this text, Sergio Bessa examines Márcia X’s art, arguing that it confronts head on middle-class paradoxes and repression. Bessa asserts that the work by this woman artist is particularly remarkable in a culture where female expression is so [...]

According to the curator Aracy Amaral, the works produced by the new generation of artists are very different from what was done during the previous decade, in the 1980s, a period that was defined by humor and a euphoric attempt to reinvigorate [...]

In this introductory essay to Nazareth Pacheco’s 1997exhibition at the Galeria Valú Ória, Tadeu Chiarelli reviews the artist’s career since her first exhibitions at the start of the decade. Chiarelli emphasizes Pacheco’s internal [...]

In this text, Helouise Costa analyzes articles on indigenous questions published in the magazine O Cruzeiro from 1943 to 1954, a question she then brings to bear on the medium of photojournalism. Following the use and manipulation of images and of [...]

According to Mário de Andrade, the author of this text on Jorge de Castro’s work—specifically on his show at the Palace Hotel do Rio de Janeiro in late 1939—which was published in the “Suplemento em Rotogravura,” de Castro has finally [...]

In his essay “O instrumento do fotógrafo ou o fotógrafo do instrumento?,” Vilém Flusser sets out to show that it is no longer possible to conceive of the photographic machine as just another instrument of production and to refuse to recognize [...]

In fairly didactic fashion, Vilém Flusser explains that the materiality of photography is provisional. It differs from traditional images because it is produced by a device and readily reproducible. Photography’s rejection of the support means an [...]

This essay is on the production of contemporary Brazilian photography that marked the first half of the twentieth century in Brazil as a continuation of artistic modernism and its ties to issues of identity as the register of the human landscape [...]

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 [...]

This essay states that Brazilian photography was usually seen through an anthropological lens and analyzed as a form of purely autonomous expression; it is now being examined in this text as a process for seeking identity and for an establishment of [...]

Ismael Xavier refers to Glauber Rocha’s essay “Uma Estética da Fome” [An Aesthetic of Hunger] in which he sees a connection to Frantz Fanon’s theory concerning an intellectual response to the consequences of colonialism. In so doing, Xavier [...]

In “Regarding Regionalism According to a Specific ‘Point of View’”—chapter four of his doctoral thesis on the work of Glauber Rocha—Ismail Xavier analyzes the process that the filmmaker uses to bypass the concept of regionalist fiction [...]