The world to order
According to the Brazilian philosopher, writer and environmental activist Ailton Krenak, “the current world to order was created. That is, he often explains in his writings, because everything is sacrificed to let the West develop. That is at the expense of traditions and nature. His ideas fit perfectly with the umbrella theme of the photo festival: Disobedient Images. At a time when everything is being swept away, which is even somewhat ‘dei’ [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] and where even a photo of the bomber who threw the atomic bomb on Hiroshima could no longer be visible because of the name of the bomber – Enola Gay – we are happy to have the photos, the organization of the most famous photo festival in Europe notes ‘Les RenContres de la Photographie’ in Arles on.
At the festival, diversity is celebrated in many different exhibitions, where a nice common thread is reserved for Brazil. So there is Ancestral Futures In which the younger generation of Brazilian photographers says he is inspired by Krenak. They show a society in which it is settled (partly also settled) with a colonial past. There are collages full of stereotypes and humor, photos in which past and present are stuck over each other. Beautiful is the photo of Mayara Ferrão, who photographed a wedding party. There is action, there is a party and yet the entire setting breathes the atmosphere of an old -fashioned still life.
‘The Wedding’, from: Unforgetting album (2024).
Photo Mayara Ferrão
Stillevens – that is the first associations you have with the photos that were taken at the end of the 1930s by the loose -resistant collective of the photo Cine Clube Bandeirante in São Paulo. Brazilian modernism from 1939 to 1964 wanted to get rid of traditional photography and trapped the clean lines of the city, the buildings and the asphalt, the parks and the electricity wires.
The optimism after the Second World War, when the authoritarian regime of VARGAS in 1945 came to an end, you can see. In black and white photos, the vastness is emphasized in addition to clean lines of buildings and objects. People look out over distant, turn circles in chairs in a carousel. Photos get titles like Construction or Composition. And also Brasilia, the new capital in the making, proved ideal for that photography. Nature is almost absent, and even humans sometimes seems part of the architecture. Otherwise that is in the ‘Deconstruction’ section where many beautiful photos can be seen from Alice Brill. Every tight line is missing here, but the city is again of the people instead of the other way around.
Paralelas e Diagonais (1950).
Photo José Yalenti
Anyone who is curious how it went after that modernism and before the youngest generation, can go to the photos of Afonso Pimenta and João Mendes who were active in the 1970s and eighties. The abstraction was over, the city sometimes even seems absent because the emphasis was placed on the role of the community in various favelas. A nice cocktail from decades of Brazilian photography can also be found at Claudia Andujar. In short: a time trip from 1939 to now in which you can see how the ‘current world was created to order’.
Praia de Copacabana (1947).
Photo Thomas Farkaz
When the horizon disappears
When Patrick Wack visits Azov’s sea in 2019, the little brother of the Black Sea, he experiences a moment of happiness. Even though the Crimea has been taken, and the threat of war hangs in the air, it mainly experiences the softness of light and the summer scent. From that moment on, he decides to come back every year to capture horizons and the people who come there. From 2022, when Russia also attacks other parts of Ukraine after the Crimea, “the horizon of the Sea of Azov disappears for the Ukrainians,” Wack writes at the exhibition. Despite the developments, he will continue to go back every summer from 2019. What starts as a series of intimate photos on the beach, moves to Russian and Ukrainian areas around the sea.
The war is penetrating without seeing anything of the fighting at Wack. Fathers who proudly stand in the sea with their son on the shoulders and families who are already water -cycle through the sea a way between surfers are slowly replaced by watermelons with the letter ‘Z’ (the letter that the Russian victory symbolizes) on it. Sons are no longer on shoulders of their fathers, but they climb on a tank while their mother holds them so that they do not slide off. Somewhere a girl is still allowed on the back of her grandfather, it is in a place where Russian heroism is celebrated during the Second World War.
‘Anatoli’ from: Charkiv in Berdiansk (2021).
Photo Patrick Wack
On one field, dead are commemorated, on another a Ukrainian woman hits fire on a field that was created by the impact of a Russian rocket. In the summer of 2024, Wack photographs the director of a theater in Herson, Oleksander Kniga. At the start of the war he was taken to be interrogated by the Russians. He will be back in 2024. All seats in the theater are covered, except for: Kniga is in a further empty room. In the same theater, but in the shelters, Wack photographs who watch cartoons. Elsewhere, a statue of Lenin is restored on one photo, on another the head of the Russian revolutionary is in the back garden with the rest of the bulky waste.
It is an impressive series. Without showing the dead, there is enough terror. Not only change the expression of the people he portrays, and the destruction is visible everywhere, but what makes an impression that the light changes. The soft light where Wack experienced his happiness moment is no longer there. It gets harder, if the light is already there at all and is not clouded by black smoke on the horizon.
From the ‘The Sea of Azov’ series (2022). Photo Patrick Wack
Boys on the sea in Odesa (2023). Photo Patrick Wack
Photo Patrick Wack
The hardness of America
“I would love to do something about this century,” said the American photographer Berenice Abbott when they are in an interview The New York Times In 1989 as a 91-year-old woman looked back at work. It was the reason for her to still take to the streets with a camera, but the sentence is also a wonderful summary of her work. Especially famous because of the way in which she recorded New York in the 1930s and the portraits of famous artists, there is also the less frequently mentioned series US Route 1. It was 1954 when she rode from New York to Key West in Florida on the oldest route of the US to end up in the north two years later at Fort Kent. She recorded communities, cities and landscapes between Maine and Florida, whereby the increasingly emphatic consumer society in the photos is unmissable. “We wanted to visually capture the character of a historic part of the United States, with all its beauty and contradictions. If visible traces of the past were left, we wanted to photograph them before Bulldozers and Born towers made their appearance,” she said about it.
Post Office, East Machias, Maine (1954).
Photo Berenice Abbott
The photographers Anna Fox and Karen Knorr decided to do the same in 2016 and mostly traveled the same route to see to what extent the US had changed. Some of the photos could have been made by Abbott. Abbott was, apart from portrait photography, also very good to capture a street scene with a casual passer -by in it, who carried the entire atmosphere of the environment. Fox and Knorr do that several times. In the town of Pahokee, for example, they lay a fairly sad building with several houses. A lonely scooter for one door, two sagged seats for the other. What makes the photo especially good is the woman who comes slightly bent to a bag. As the only living creature in the photo, she emphasizes the lifelessness of the environment.
For example, the polarized country is excellently portrayed in that one route, with puffy thick cars on the road and poverty along the road; Jesus who opens his arms alongside grinning clowns who seem to have run away from a horror film, large American flags, and neglected houses with pro-trump flags coupled to anti-abortion boards with ‘Say no to full term Murder of Maine Babies. ‘ There is a man with Maga Petje, but also a man who holds a plate along the road in the hope of finding a job. Another strictly his laces, and has laid his plate on the floor stating ‘Too ugly to be a stripper. ‘
Lobster Shack, Islamorada.
Balm valley.
Photo Anna Fox & Karen Knorr
Abbott’s photos did not show a nice image of the country that was the post-war ideal for many, but her black and white photos still evoke a certain nostalgia. The color photos of Anna Fox and Karen Knorr convincingly show that the country did not improve, but especially emphasize how merciless the US is.