"Modernities: Brazilian Photography (1940-1964)" Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian

"Modernities: Brazilian Photography (1940-1964)" is a photographic exhibition that offers an impeccable look into the booming transformation of Brazil, a country whose productive muscle began to strengthen during the 1940s. The show captures a period of time in which the country experienced a profound social transformation and deep changes in its cultural life, as well as political repression and an ambitious program of modernization that did not hesitate to build magnificent structures that crystallized modernity as a concept in the region.

The curatorial team, formed by Antonio Pinto Ribeiro, Ludger Derenthal and Samuel Titan Jr., revisits the fundamentals of modern photography in Brazil through the work of four mayor photographers: Parisian Marcel Gautherot (1910-1996), Brazilian José Medeiros (1921-1990), Hungarian Thomaz Frakaz (1924-2011), and German Hans Günter Flieg (1923). The conceptual thread that weaves their different styles allows for an understanding of a hybrid and consistent Brazilian modernity.

Gautherot represents the "Modern Synthesis" section. Passionate about ethnography and great admirer of Oscar Niemeyer, the French photographer immortalized with his photographs the colonial and baroque monuments in Mina Gerais. Its lens captured the construction of Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil. Gautherot dissected the foundations of the Congresso Nacional under construction, and chiseled with shadows the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro (1967) and the Pavilion of the São Paulo Biennale (1955).

The section titled "The Spectacle of Brazil" is based on works by José Medeiros. In 1946, Jean Mazon, who called the Brazilian photographer "the poet of light," invited Medeiros to join O Cruzeiro, an important avant-garde magazine that forged the basis of Brazilian photojournalism.

During the 1940s Medeiros documented the glamorous lifestyle of Copacabana and portrayed important personalities of the cultural and social sphere. Standing out from the themes covered in this section is the capturing of the syncretic practice of Candomblé in Salvador, Brazil (1951), its moments of trance and the different atavistic processes of this ceremony.

Between 1949 and 1957, Medeiros was part of an expedition across the Amazon jungle where he documented in silver gradients the peoples of the Mato Grosso, Pará and Caiapó indigenous tribes, capturing the local architecture and beautiful geometric figures formed by the multitude of intertwined bodies of their inhabitants in photographs that are regarded as a contribution to Brazilian ethnology.

The section titled "Of the Forms of Men" is headed by Thomaz Farkas, advocate of a "pure visual grammar" that leans towards abstraction and rejects pictorialism. Farkas photographed the Pacaembu Stadium and the human dimension found in the beaches of Copacabana. The works by him that are included in this exhibition contextualize the new inhabitants of these structural masses that are projected into the future.

The section "Mechanisms, Organisms" features images of São Paulo, the new industrial capital of Brazil, taken by Hans Günter Flieg. Flieg proposes a fantastic ode to the apparatus of progress; from delicate utensils that appear to float under surgical light, to complex gear against which man appears minute. Paradoxically the capturing of certain objects acquires an organic status.

The exhibition closes with a brief but profound reflection on the 1964 Brazilian military coup d'état—which marked the end of the period covered in the show—a time of censorship, prohibitions, counterculture and the emergence of color photography; all new motifs that will shape the next chapter of photography in Brazil.