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The coexistence of members who delighted in soft-focus timelessness and those with a more engaged, experimental agenda was a hallmark of both the CFM and the FCCB, although by the early 1950s the conservative leadership of the FCCB (responsible for the content of their monthly Boletim) was more likely to ignore rather than attack those who strayed from their Pictorialist principles. The most notable example of this was their failure to address Geraldo de Barros’s one-person exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), in January 1951. The radical invention seen in de Barros’s presentation, “Fotoforma”, challenged the very definition of a photograph, with shaped prints, forms scratched into the negatives, and freestanding displays; probably many members of the FCCB simply didn’t know what to make of it. Pietro Maria Bardi, MASP’s founding director, wrote a text in the accompanying brochure that may have compounded the issue: “Geraldo unwillingly photographs the real, I would say that he does not comprehend it, and, without avoiding it, he seeks to discover in it a useful purity drawn from his meditations: lines filtered so that only parts are revealed, and lights reduced into sketches from which it is impossible to reconstruct their origins.” (Bardi was Italian and had moved to Brazil with his wife, the architect Lina Bo Bardi, in 1946, which may explain some of the strangeness of his phrasing, preserved in this translation by Tiê Higashi.) By contrast, Thomaz Farkas’s one-person show at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP), which opened in July 1949, pushed the boundaries of traditional practices with its exhibition design, if not with the photographs themselves, and was the subject of a rapturous review.

Perhaps the fundamental difference between the FCCB and the CFM is that before too long the leadership of the FCCB embraced this “modern” impulse (or at least the look of it), whereas the CFM’s staunch refusal to reexamine its aesthetic values meant that it was increasingly inhospitable to distinct approaches among its members. It was similarly out of touch with contemporary trends that were familiar to most North American and European audiences through programming such as Edward Steichen’s presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, including “The Family of Man” in 1955, and exhibitions of the work of German photographer Otto Steinert and his Subjective Photography movement, which also traveled to the MAM-SP, in 1955.

One means of mapping this trajectory is to consider the mentions of Mexican photography and photographers in the FCCB Boletim, the first of which is a note in the May 1952 issue that the CFM’s magazine was available in the FCCB library. By 1957, it was La Ventana, a CFM splinter group, that was honored with an exhibition in the FCCB headquarters (and a three-page illustrated article in the Boletim). In a mention of the First Latin American Exhibition of Photography (which opened in Mexico City in June 1959 and traveled to the fccb and other venues in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay), credit for the collaborative initiative is given to La Ventana and the FCCB, not the CFM.

The status of the amateur in photography has complicated and enlivened the medium ever since George Eastman introduced his Kodak No. 1 in 1889: Pictorialism is inextricably linked to photography’s widespread popularity, even as a reaction against it. After World War II, preserving the distinction between fine-art photography and popular practices may have seemed less important than thinking about the medium as a way of bringing people together, culminating, perhaps, in “The Family of Man”. This impulse to connect was also expressed through the vast international network of photo clubs and salons to which the FCCB and the CFM belonged, where artists and amateurs danced, drank, and critiqued photographs together. This physical network held much in common with social-media platforms today where artists virtually socialize with millions of people whose only camera is found in their pockets.