Luis Brito

"I was walking in the streets of Cairo when I learned that John Lennon had been murdered. I went to the local cemetery and started photographing the angels that adorned some of the tombs": this is how, several years ago, Luis Brito explained to the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal the beginning of his relationship with photography. The same scene was repeated for two years, but in different locations: Brito went to cemeteries in Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Ciudad Bolívar, Valencia, and Caracas, and captured those stone images. Since then, his talent for photography gained numerous recognitions in the Latin American art field, among them the National Culture Award for Photography, in 1996. Brito, who was interested in his country's social themes, was born in the state of Sucre on January 5, 1945. He studied at the Luis Caballero Mejías Technical Industrial School, in Caracas, starting in 1959. In 1964 he studied film with Antonio Llerandi, at Caracas' Ateneo; six years later, in 1970, he started making photographs with Vladimir Sersa. Brito was a portrait artist interested in poverty, but also in universal themes such as religion, loneliness, and death. His photographs reveal many impressions of everyday sensitivity, and they explore and analyze various customs of man in his time and place, with a balance between the aesthetic and the social. He worked as a photographer in magazines such as Imagen, Escena, and Papel Literario, and served as a juror in national and international photography salons. Brito was also the director of the National Fine Arts and Culture Institute's Photography Department, and a member of "El Grupo", a free association of photographers dedicated to documenting life in the country. In the 1990s, Brito worked in cibachrome color and incorporated urban scenes into his photographs. In early 2014, the artist donated an important selection of 81 of his photographs to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá, in celebration of the institution's 50 years. The donation included photographs from famous series, such as Recuerdas a Eleanor Rigby, Desasosiego, and Una noche en el camerino, all of them landmarks in his career. His death last Sunday March 1st, at the age of 70, was announced by Venezuela's Casa del Artista foundation, and it took by surprise the art world. Brito is now a large absence in the arts of Latin America. He will be remembered for series like those of cemetery angels, or his Reverón dolls, among others. His works are included in collections such as the Centro Studie Archivo Della Comunicazione del Universitá degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy; the International Center of the Image, Rome, Italy; and Caracas' Museo de Bellas Artes, Venezuela.