Photojournalism

 

This image shows a woman taking a picture with the military police in Brazil.

It was taken on the last protest against the corruption and the current government.

This image can describe a great amount of things that are wrong in this protest. Most of the people in this protest are privileged white people, who were used to being privileged and now are suffering with the crisis that has installed in Brazil. The past governments were also corrupt, as much as the current one, or maybe more. But they ran their actions in favour to the privileged rich people. The stole the nation’s money, they were corrupt but as long as the rich were still rich, they did not care about it. Now the situation has changed because the new government is still corrupt but now they do not make decisions only thinking about the rich, and this is bothering them. In this protest, 3 men were leading and speaking. All three are homophobic. One of them says that the parents should beat their children when they are young if they find out their son or daughter is gay. This man was speaking against the government and people were listening to it.

The other problem in this image is the fact that the military police is only pacific in protest where rich people are involved. If you search for images of student protests and protests in favour of the teachers right, you see terrifying images of the police making dreadful things to them. You can see all that in that image. So many things are wrong in this country but this is not the right way to fix them.

The path of a woman

The images show the path of a woman wiling to change her life. She decided to move on from the depressive, sad, dreadful life she used to have and change the environment around her, move somewhere else, somewhere she does not know yet.

At the beginning we see someone leaving the house, is it her or is it the person who was causing her so much pain? Second, we see an empty place. It could be the place she has been around in this journey trying to move on or it could mean how she feels inside everyday in this dreadful life. A city, an empty city, her path in the search of moving on, her life is different now, she is trying to change her life, she wants to move on.

She stops and stand admiring the view, thinking about her life and everything she is leaving behind in the search of her new self, she is depressed, she is desperate to change, she wants help, she thinks this new place can help her. This new place has more green, this place has nature, this place does not have anyone she know and it could be either good or bad. She has to options: to go to the dark way inside the suicide forest and end her life or to decide to be a better person, to heal and forget everything bad that happened to her, to become a better version of her, to live a good life, make new friends, find new hobbies, new loves, be someone she never dreamt she could be and be happy. It is her choice.

Review of Rio-Montevideo

Photography by Edouard Fraipont

Rosangela Rennó’s latest exhibition Rio-Montevideo at the Photographer’s gallery is a great example of how social amnesia was developed in the Latin American societies that suffered with military dictatorship.

Rosangela is a Brazilian artist born in Belo Horizonte and based in Rio de Janeiro with exhibitions all around the world. She chooses to use other photographer’s image in her projects and her works highlight history that has already been forgotten or was hidden as she selects images that are related to the past, like in her past work Immemorial (1994) that presents images of construction workers who died when building Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, or in Cicatriz (1996) where she works with images of the Penitentiary Museum os São Paulo.

Her work breaks the traditional barrier of how a photography must be seen and creates different ways and experiences for how the spectator can observe an image.

The artist says she tries to understand how people relate to the images, it is more important to her the ways of seeing an image than the image itself.

“Contrary to what many people think I like amnesia, not memory. I talk about the things missing, the absences, I question the institution and its difficulty to deal with memories”

(Rennó, 2013)

The exhibit’s images were photographed in the late 1950’s and early 1970’s by the photojournalist Aurelio Gonzales, who worked for the El popular communist newspaper. Being aware that those images would probably be destroyed by the dictatorship and that the newspaper would come to an end he hid 48,626 negatives inside a wall cavity in his office in Montevideo, Uruguay.

He was forced to leave his country and spent the next twelve years in exile around Europe and America, only being able to go back to his home country in 1985 when the military dictatorship came to an end. He then tried to find the negatives he hid in the wall but the building was going under renovations and the images could not be found anymore. They remained hidden for two more decades when the son of the owner of the building discovered them in 2006. The images went to the Centro de Fotografia that managed to work on the recovery of the full archive.

Thanks to Aurelio, those images still exist, otherwise they would have been destroyed by the military forces just like a great amount of other documents that were created and then destroyed in that period. 

The exhibition is composed by images selected by Rosangela Rennó and can be mistaken by an art installation instead of a photography exhibition by the way it is composed.

She used twenty vintage slide projectors of different formats, eras and models that were found in flea markets around Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Montevideo, Uruguay.

The projectors give a analog feel to the exhibition that can relate to the materiality of the El Popular’s hidden negatives. She transformed the negatives to slide images in order to using the projectors.

The projector also have switches which means that each spectator sees the images in a different way. It depends on how many people are in the room, and how many projectors are on. Some images are overlapping in some parts, but you can only see them if both projectors are switched on at the same time which I found to be very interesting because I haven’t noticed that detail in the beginning when I was looking at the images one by one, it only caught my attention when someone next to me turned on another projector and the image overlapped the one I was looking. The feeling that you can control what you see and when you see it relates to how it is to read a newspaper. When you are in your house, reading a newspaper or seeing photographs you can control which images you want to pay more attention and which images you don’t, you can control how long you see those images, and this changes from one person to another. The projector also have a loud noise and the artist decided to try to hide the noise playing a sound similar to a music box sound but the music being played was the Communist International music which created an more powerful ambience to the environment.

The theme chosen for the exhibition is particularly interesting for me, since I’m a Brazilian and I have studied the history of my country and I am quite interested about this subject, but I find it more interesting that it was chosen to be displayed in a european country where people normally don’t study much about Latin America and its dictatorships. Living in this country I found out that people do not study about my country at all, and some of them do not even know where it is located. So the idea of seeing a exhibition in London created by a Brazilian artist with images of Uruguay was quite odd and interesting to me.

Rosangela Rennó being a Brazilian that was born near the beginning of the military dictatorship in her country made her be able to relate to the images she chose to show for the public. She lived in the dictatorship times and choosing those photographs was her way to establish her own relation to those images since Uruguay’s dictatorship happened after the Brazilian one and both were very similar to one another.

My mother was born in the same year as her and she told me stories about the time she was a child and her mother would tell her to be careful with bad man and that she should behave on the  streets because the government were mean and could take her and also about how she had to sing the Brazilian anthem everyday in school and much more various stories. Being born in Brazil and studying the dictatorship and hearing stories from my mother made me understand the choice of each picture in this exhibition. The use of football and other sports images reminded me about when I learnt that the military dictatorship used to distract the Brazilian society from all of the problems the country was suffering, from the violence, the protests and torture happening in our country using forms of entertainment such as football to change the society’s attention from the other problems, for example the Brazilian football team won the World Cup in 1970 when the country was on its peak of the repression and violence. The images of the protests are also extremely important to be displayed since those would be the photos that would probably be destroyed by the government and are the ones that demonstrate how the dictatorship was unpopular and violent.

The images chosen by the artist are very similar to the reality she lived in her country and this connection she has with the subject she is exhibiting is something that makes the images much more powerful than it would be if someone that hasn’t lived in this reality selected the images to be featured in the gallery.

It is important to talk about how the governments around the world play with the society’s memories by only showing what is positive to them, specially the countries that lived with dictatorship.

As Russell Jacoby said in “Social Amnesia”

“ Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged; to be transcended it must first be remembered. Social amnesia is society’s repression of remembrance – society’s own past. It is a psychic commodity of the commodity society.”

(Jacoby, 1975)

We still have repressed memories of our old governments and its old mistakes. Specially in Brazil, we are living in a time of discontentment with the current government and it makes the citizen’s minds forget of how the old government was as much or maybe more corrupt as this one. The anger and discontentment that people are feeling are a advantage for the old government to use it as a tool to play with their memories and aplly it in their own favour to get the power. That is why it is important to have artists such as Rosangela Rennó to keep reminding us of our old mistakes and how not to repeat them, to show the world images that are not showed in our everyday lives, to make us see the reality other people lived and live in, to see images that are hidden from the public’s eyes.

‘At the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved.’

(Annie Carson, 2013)

For me this sentence is a good example of explaining how many things we do not see, how many secrets we do not know, and how we should know them, specially if it is about our nation.

In conclusion, I believe that it is a very powerful exhibition and it should be seen by everyone form any nationality to understand and to remember everything that happened to those countries in those difficult times. Learning other country’s history is a way of learning about your own history.

Bibliography

Wells, L. (2003). The photography reader. London: Routledge.

Jacoby, R. (1975). Social amnesia. Boston: Beacon Press.

Leonard, T. (2006). Encyclopedia of the developing world. New York: Routledge.

The Photographers’ Gallery. (2016). Rosângela Rennó – The Photographers’ Gallery. [online] Available at: http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/rosangelo-renno-rio-montevideo-2 [Accessed 15 Mar. 2016].

Vasquez, P. (2016). Biografia de Rosângela Rennó | Brasil Memória das Artes. [online] Funarte.gov.br. Available at: http://www.funarte.gov.br/brasilmemoriadasartes/acervo/infoto/biografia-de-rosangela-renno/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2016].

Museum and Gallery Reviews. (2016). Rosangela Renno – Rio-Montevideo: The Photographers Gallery. [online] Available at: https://exhibitionsmith.wordpress.com/2016/01/31/rosangela-renno-rio-montevideo-the-photographers-gallery/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2016].

Enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br. (1988). Rosângela Rennó – Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural. [online] Available at: http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa10376/rosangela-renno [Accessed 15 Mar. 2016].

Galeriavermelho.com.br. (2016). ROSÂNGELA RENNÓ | Galeria Vermelho. [online] Available at: http://www.galeriavermelho.com.br/pt/artista/44/ros%C3%A2ngela-renn%C3%B3 [Accessed 15 Mar. 2016].

Rosangelarenno.com.br. (2016). Rosângela Rennó. [online] Available at: http://www.rosangelarenno.com.br/biografia/pt [Accessed 15 Mar. 2016].

Virginia, T. (2013). Rosangela Rennó e as imagens que não existem. [online] Forumfoto.org.br. Available at: http://www.forumfoto.org.br/rosangela-renno-e-as-imagens-que-nao-existem/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2016].

Brito, B. (2016). Ciencias da Linguagem – Jorwiki – O discurso do regime militar brasileiro durante a copa do mundo de 1970. [online] Usp.br. Available at: http://www.usp.br/cje/jorwiki/exibir.php?id_texto=58 [Accessed 15 Mar. 2016].

Underwater Nude

Images of the female body photographed by men are usually shot so other men can admire. The idea of the female body as a object to be looked at exists for a long time. John Berger said:

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

(Berger 1972a: 47)

This objectification of the female body is a big problem in the world that feminists are fighting everyday to be changed. Photography is already an objectification of the subject but the use of nude bodies in it with a sexual connotation doubles the objectification of the woman.

This image caught my attention because even if it is a photography of the woman body, I couldn’t feel the objectification of the woman in this picture. The use of the light and the body underwater made the image more subtle and artistic, less sexual. The shadows and lights hide parts of the body but the most important fact is that the face of the model isn’t in the picture. The image has no relation to a face, therefore it doesn’t have an identity.

The author of the image is Brett Weston, Edward Weston’s son and if you compare their images, they have very similar compositions.

Edward weston’s wife, Charis Wilson said:

“If the face appears, the picture is inevitably a portrait and the expression of the face will dictate the viewer’s response to the body”

(Charis Wilson)

The lack of face and expression in this pictures turns the body into something else but a woman. The objectification and sexualization of the body changes when there’s no face related to it. It becomes an object but not necessarily a sexual one. The sexualised men gaze changes to a ordinary viewer’s gaze.

Bibliography

Wells, L. (2003). The photography reader. London: Routledge.

Heron, L. and Williams, V. (1996). Illuminations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Wells, L. (2000). Photography. London: Routledge.

 

Family photography

I chose this picture because I’m posing with my older cousins and I don’t have many pictures with them later in my life. I asked my mother some things about this picture.

Q: Where was this picture taken and who took it?

A: It was taken in your aunt’s place and I took it.

Q: Did we go there a lot?

A: We used to go there all the time because you loved the pool and the beach. You loved water.

Q: What do you remember about this particular day?

A: There was a famous actor that used to live there that was playing with you and your.

My father jumped in and said that on this specific day he spent the entire day playing with me in the water slide. I loved playing there. That’s why I was looking mad at the picture. My mother forced me to take the picture while I wanted to play at the pool.

As Annete Kuhn said in Family Secrets:

“ Photographs are evidence, after all. Not that they are to be taken at face value, necessarily, nor that they mirror the real, nor even that a photograph offers any self-evidence relationship between itself and what it shows. Simply that a photograph can be material for interpretation”

(Kuhn, 2002)

This photography was taken to show me with my cousins and the day we spent together because my mother loved to take pictures of various moments of my life. I don’t blame her for that, and it’s nice to know that she remembers the things that happened on that day because of that picture, but this picture doesn’t show the truth of that day. I didn’t spent my day playing with my cousins, I spent my day playing in the pool with my father on the water slide but we don’t have any pictures of that moment. The one we have is the one that is most common to be in a family album.

Bibliography

Kuhn, A. (2002). Family secrets. London: Verso.

Hirsch, M. (1997). Family frames. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

I chose this picture because I’m posing with my older cousins and I don’t have many pictures with them later in my life. I asked my mother some things about this picture.

Q: Where was this picture taken and who took it?

A: It was taken in your aunt’s place and I took it.

Q: Did we go there a lot?

A: We used to go there all the time because you loved the pool and the beach. You loved water.

Q: What do you remember about this particular day?

A: There was a famous actor that used to live there that was playing with you and your.

My father jumped in and said that on this specific day he spent the entire day playing with me in the water slide. I loved playing there. That’s why I was looking mad at the picture. My mother forced me to take the picture while I wanted to play at the pool.

As Annete Kuhn said in Family Secrets:

“ Photographs are evidence, after all. Not that they are to be taken at face value, necessarily, nor that they mirror the real, nor even that a photograph offers any self-evidence relationship between itself and what it shows. Simply that a photograph can be material for interpretation”

(Kuhn, 2002)

This photography was taken to show me with my cousins and the day we spent together because my mother loved to take pictures of various moments of my life. I don’t blame her for that, and it’s nice to know that she remembers the things that happened on that day because of that picture, but this picture doesn’t show the truth of that day. I didn’t spent my day playing with my cousins, I spent my day playing in the pool with my father on the water slide but we don’t have any pictures of that moment. The one we have is the one that is most common to be in a family album.

Bibliography

Kuhn, A. (2002). Family secrets. London: Verso.

Hirsch, M. (1997). Family frames. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

An image I like

 

Photography by Nirrimi Firebrace

The image chosen was photographed by a young photographer from Australia and it called my attention because of the emotion I see in the girl’s eyes. The whole image is simple and there is nothing special about it but if you just pay attention to the details it can make you interpret the feelings she might be going through.

The look in her eyes and her body language (with there arms around her legs) makes the girl look fragile, vulnerable and maybe even afraid. You can notice a lot of feelings and meanings for this special image just by looking at it.

The colour chosen for the outfit is very important too, because it’s a similar colour to the girl’s skin and hair and shows how the composition was thought with no colourful outfits distracting the viewer from the girl’s expression.

Another thing to think is whose emotion is being represented at the picture. We know the girl looks vulnerable but did the photographer make the model look like that because she wanted that girl to be a form of demonstration of her own feelings? Maybe it’s not possible to understand that by only looking to one single photo of the artist. The answer to this question might come when you analyse more photos of the same photographer, but I believe that the emotion the girl is passing in the image is a mix of her own feelings and the photographer’s way of communicating through her lens.

Just like Rolland Barthes said in “Camera Lucida”:

“I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or three emotions, or three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs…And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent…” 

(Barthes, 1981)

The interpretation of a photograph travels through those three elements of the photography. First is what the photographer wanted to transmit through the image, second is how the spectator saw it and interpreted and third how the subject photographed transmitted their emotions to the image.

Bibliography

Wells, L. (2003). The photography reader. London: Routledge.

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.