Miguel Rio Branco and Helena Martins-Costa: Multiple Operations Between Documentary and Document

Today, the notion of ‘documentary’ in photography is rather detrimental. Our current conception of the term is the result of a process of naturalizing a pre-determined view of art history, in particular the history of photography from the cultural perspective of the United States, a country that has greatly contributed to the expansion of modern photography.

The almost totalitarian idea that factual photographs have an alleged social commitment with reality still persists. Undoubtedly, photographic images have a unique proximity to objects. As such, both the discourse around the veracity of photojournalism, as proclaimed by the media, and the inevitable physical relationship between the person who takes the photo — whose interest is everyday social interactions — and their object, were responsible for forging a limited, naïve and perverse view of the ‘documentary genre’ in the last few decades.

Artists that defy the crystalized protocol of this genre or that delve into the photographic document with a certain level of suspicion tend to come up with responses that are far more inquisitive than the calm horizon of islands that enclose the several — often mistaken — categories of photographic activity: journalism, publicity, fashion, art, documentary, creative, contaminated or constructed photography.

It is not about turning our backs on applied photography or denying its potential as a language, or even advocating for the noble and idealized status of a ‘work of art’. Instead, we must pay close attention to the symbolic discourses built by the modern culture of images, as well as navigate this minefield with an attitude of intervention and confrontation. With radically opposed bodies of work in terms of formal configuration, temperature and discourse, both Miguel Rio Branco and Helena Martins-Costa work in this territory riddled with sign-laden traps.

From as early as the mid 1970s, following a strong interest in the human landscape of deep Brazil, Rio Branco started to work with photography from the perspective of the idea of a scrapbook. His exhibitions appear to be scribbles of his impressions of a country that is socially precarious but at the same time erotic in its physical presence, and empowered by its inhabitants. How can one deal with all this without falling into the trap of ‘documentary photography’? Rio Branco tirelessly challenges the protocol, sometimes contradicting himself, other times skillfully avoiding it through the lyricism of his images, which gain power when displayed alongside images of a different nature, creating unexpected clashes, fusions, and associations.

From the end of the 1970s to his recent major solo shows, the artist has been striving for his own discourse to confront the genre. This confrontation is unsettling and unstable, as it affects the spectator not in the strict sense of raising awareness of the political-social status of his Brazilian (and global) cultural characters or landscapes, but in the sense of triggering an erotic experience through the life force that emanates from those bodies as they go about their everyday struggle.

His image-clusters displace viewers from a specific historical context, throwing them back at the universe of the image. In this rapid comeback, this universe is so shattered by the rapture proposed by the artist that we feel disoriented by the radicalism of this social experience, as if it was a live act experienced with delight.

The sense of disquiet we experience in front of Rio Branco’s images — built by loose elements in space-time — is the result of the way the artist dismantles the documentary protocol and its pre-established discourse as far as fact, place, event, or people are concerned. Moved by sensations triggered by the photos that are partially removed from their contexts, we experience a different narrative arrangement, which is somewhat more abstract in its discourse but bears the same concreteness of captured facts. In this game, abstractions and photographic figurations dance to a song whose melody alternates between clear, pristine notes and dense, obscure and dissonant passages. This game is one of Rio Branco’s strategies to challenge and experiment with the documentary protocol of photography. His decade-long photo archive is constantly revisited, often bringing back the same images or sequences, which return reorganized, orchestrated like vibrant new symphonies.

The exhibition “Maldicidade” [City Sickness] is one of the many examples of this confrontation in the photographer’s poetic dynamics. It was originally launched in 2010 at Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS-SP), in São Paulo, with the full title “Maldicidade — Marco zero” [City Sickness — Zero Ground]. The catalog was later published in 2012 and, in 2014, Cosac Naify re-published it with the shorter title “Maldicidade”. In 2019, it returns to galeria Luisa Strina, concomitantly to a new edition of the book published by Taschen. Each work, book or exhibition represents a new exploration of Rio Branco’s archive, in which the artist decontextualizes and recontextualizes the photographed fact, sometimes rearranging visual sequences that gain the complexity missing from documentary tradition, other times giving himself into pure formalist delight, as an aesthete unsettled by the social world.

In the 2019 edition of Maldicidade, scenes and characters from the Pelourinho area of Salvador (“Leninha verde” [Green Leninha], 1979-2018) meet scenes captured in Tokyo (“Sapatos azuis e vermelhos” [Blue and Red Shoes], 2008-18), cars and houses in Havana (“Flying Dark Vader”, 1994-2019, “Sombras barrocas de Havana” [Baroque Shadows of Havana], 1994-2019) and Electra’s propellers in flight (“Electra”, 1989-2019). All these word-images fluctuate in sets. Some are loose as a single element, but the whole group is ruled by a composition that updates his intervention in the documentary protocol. Rio Branco’s action in the minefield of factual photography is far from discreet; instead, it is emotional, relying on narrative artifice. The artist invades the treacherous terrain, deftly stepping over almost all explosives. Perhaps this explains the visceral effect of his body of work, which evokes sensation more than understanding.