My choice for the Amazon is simple and natural, I avoid the stereotypes and fads that nullify those who live there and make their history. A common history made up of anonymous people, knowledgeable about nature, creative in their essence and happy in their daily lives made up of canoe trips, river baths, hard work and lots of hope.
(Luiz Braga, imaginary archipelago, catalogue, IMS, 2025, p. 23)
By Henry Burnett
An exhibition that puts an artist's work into perspective is usually a privileged space for contemplation, but also for reflection. This is the great event of Luiz Braga – Imaginary archipelago at the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS Paulista), which, curated by Bitu Cassundé, covers the 50-year career of the photographer from Belém through 258 photos. Having attended one or two exhibitions in Belém, seen some photos at different times over the years, and followed the artist's generous Instagram, nothing compares to what a visit to this exhibition reveals in panorama. It's like entering a silent film, sometimes in black and white, sometimes in Technicolor. Fantasy and reality are constantly contrasted during the hours we spend absorbed in the photos.
For many people who arrived as teenagers in the 1980s, Belém was a closed-off city. The few accesses that gave a view of the Guamá River or the Guajará Bay were tourist spots. Lumber mills, industries, bars, shipyards and the like surrounded around 90% of the coastline. The “ladder” – a symbolic place that gave fishermen access to the river – was like a window, or a lens through which one could see the forest, the boats and the people traveling in them. The city and the forest barely mixed. It was possible to feel like one was in a total city, in a second nature, today expanded to the limit of absurdity.
Despite this, what the photos reveal to more or less privileged people may not be something invisible, but simply ignored by them. One of the astonishing things about being in front of Luiz Braga's work is the feeling of the permanence of the city's economic contrasts. But saying this is not to touch on the essence. His photos (re)actualize everything in our weak collective memory. But it is here, precisely in the face of the astonishment they cause, that the ethical and political dimension of his work is revealed in close connection with his aesthetic choices.
There are 50 years of career and thousands of photos. I chose six, one from each decade, from 1970 to 2020, commented in chronological order.
Potter (1979)
The photo is part of a cohesive set of images dedicated to the workers of Pará. In this case, the person portrayed is a potter, that is, a man who makes or sells ceramic objects. He does not look at the photographer; he seems busy with his work. His torso and neck are tense, giving the impression that he is exerting intense force on something, but his face is calm and his gaze is focused; if there is any effort in his work, it is not noticeable. The photo is similar to those of the German photographer August Sander, who also portrayed manual workers at work, especially in Face of the time (Antlitz of Time, Schirmer/Mosel, 2003), one of his most well-known works, and which was part of a larger project called Men of the 20th century (Month 20. Years). I would like to suggest that this brotherhood is not only aesthetic – especially because the authorial identity of each photographer is preserved in its singularity, as it could not be otherwise – it is also, in particular, ethical. Like August Sander, Luiz Braga was concerned with recording his people and, despite the abysmal differences between the German circumstances of the interwar period and the social vulnerability of many people living in the Amazon, both safeguarded the beauty, the lightness, the grace and, above all, the daily struggle of anonymous people. This beautiful man, represented in a contrast between silver and black, with his bronze complexion, is the master of his art, his life and his destiny. He owes nothing to the progress that ravages the world, he remains intact in his manual function. His work with clay and water in no way diminishes him. One only has to look at him for a few moments to be sure that we are before a man of all times, who existed in the beginning and must continue to exist.
Audience at Ver-o-Peso (1985)
This photo is part of the first phase of the photographer's work, when, in his words, “I didn't have the habit of reflecting on my photography” (imaginary archipelago, op. cit., p. 23). It may have been one of the photographs that remained in the archive for decades, like much of what he produced in black and white at the beginning of his career. For Luiz Braga, it was also a “revelation” to see the photos enlarged for the first time from the negatives developed in the IMS laboratory in Rio de Janeiro – the exquisite printing work is a separate chapter in the exhibition. Details of a medium-sized boat appear in the background, ropes, ladders, the mast; further back we see the edge of the forest and between them the Guajará Bay. The forest and the river are not in focus, they do not even frame the scene, they are even covered by a few heads, they seem to be there only so that we know we are facing the river, near the Ver-o-Peso market. In this photo from the first decade of his production, Luiz Braga had already made a decisive choice: all the Amazonian exuberance that he would reveal about life outside would be human, and not only that, he would also choose characters on the fringes of the socially and economically privileged life of Belém and its surroundings. We see only two girls in the photo, in the foreground, and half of a boy's face in the lower right corner. Everything indicates that they are workers at the market, perhaps some customers, half black, half mixed race, in a moment of distraction. They look at the ground, with the exception of the black teenager with the T-shirt wrapped around his neck, the only one looking at the photographer. We don't know what they are looking at, they are serious, some frowning in thought. In the center of the image is a man with curly hair Black Power almost stands out, but all the faces have unique expressiveness, there are no protagonists. In this photo, Luiz Braga captures two fundamental ethnic representations of the formation of the people of Pará, the blacks and the caboclos – the latter with strong indigenous features. They are the excluded of yesterday and today. There is no one who can be called white. There are also no customers, only servants and their children. The photo is exactly 40 years old. Almost nothing has changed from a socioeconomic point of view, but that does not seem to be all that the photographer's eyes saw in the scene. The people maintain a profound austerity. The girl in the center of the photo, who seems to be holding a Styrofoam box under her left arm, keeps her right arm on her waist, her expression rigid as if the attraction in front of her needed to give more to justify the interruption in her sales. Beside her, with a wooden box in her hand, the long-haired woman is less serious than annoyed, nor does she seem convinced. All the adult men preserve rigor and severity in their expressions. There is a great mystery in what we cannot see and these characters can; it is what keeps the photo lasting. What they see disturbs and bothers us, in the same way that it confuses us to look at their impassive faces, imagining what they think, what they expect from what was offered to them then, what remains of their desires today.
Woman on the Transamazonica (1996)
There is no stronger symbol of the impact of the arrival of modernity in the Amazon than the opening of the Trans-Amazonian Highway by the Military Regime in 1972, whose declared intention was to integrate the northern region with the rest of Brazil through its occupation and settlement, sordidly ignoring the people who had lived in the region for millennia. The disaster of this disorderly process is still felt today, especially in relation to the degradation of the environment previously occupied predominantly by indigenous people and their mixed-race descendants. Bye Bye Brazil, from 1980, Cacá Diegues already showed an irreversible process of destruction and decay on the sides of the monumental highway, but he also revealed unheard-of beauties; Luiz Braga takes that cinematic impulse to the extreme. In the photo, a short, black woman with wavy hair walks toward nothingness. We are on one of the many unpaved stretches of a highway that was never finished, an emblem of the very country it was supposed to connect. Her purse could indicate that she is not an indigenous, “acculturated” woman, her elegant dress and leather sandals allow us to imagine a migrant from the Northeast; deep down, it is not so bad to be unaware of her origin and destiny, because she is many, she represents the women who were born and live there or who were forced to move to those wastelands in search of a better life; she goes wherever she wants. If on the one hand the photo exposes the smallness of this body amidst the dense forest and the endless road, on the other hand it expresses the strength of a woman of indeterminate age, who has to walk many kilometers every day. Facing the feared BR-230 alone, eating the dust of the trucks that cross it, says everything about her strength and fearlessness. Around her, the forest seems to want to reoccupy the space it tore through. This coexistence of humans and nature is one of the great challenges when thinking about the occupation of the Amazon. Letting it exist in its complexity or occupying it, producing through it; what fate awaits them is the question we must urgently answer.
Promisers (2006)
Luiz Braga has photographed the Círio de Nazaré countless times. In this photo we see a cutout of one of the most striking forms of devotion in the procession, the rope, the ultimate symbol of the pilgrims’ faith. Many layers of meaning run through this photograph. The first and most striking of these is erotic. Young men lean on each other holding their biceps, so close that nothing comes between them. A rare moment when masculinity gives way to contact between individuals without hurting their pride, like in an effusive hug after a goal. Bare feet, a mixture of sweat, and the exhaustion of hours that seem to go by make everyone equal before the patron saint. When the rope passes, panic sets in among the crowd, there is no control over the force and suffering it carries. On the other hand, we have a second important layer represented in this snapshot: the revelation of faith in its entirety, without clichés, adornments, and subterfuges. The Círio, as part of the “identity of Pará” along with the food, music, language and accents, has not escaped the stereotypes of what is now claimed as “authentic”, “unique” and “symbolic”, especially by those manipulating public opinion and communicators from the most varied spectrums; as there is no shortage of opportunists in their boxes, crying in public when the saint passes by, while broadcasting live on Instagram. In this and other records of the Círio, Luiz Braga reveals a moment of high representation, and manages the feat of bypassing all official representations, although they often try to co-opt his work; without success. Men leaning on each other’s shoulders, prostrate, dragged along, promising or not, who expect more from the world and from life.
Marajoara knight (2018)
Of the photos discussed here, this is the only one that deliberately displaces us, suspending reality for an illusory and ethereal moment. It is one of the photos that drags the viewer into a mythical space. The rider and his animal are outside of time; the space around them is a continuation of their bodies. The figure of this man refers to many legends and mythologies, not only local but transnational, not only regional but also secular. Two in particular speak loudest: the myth of Narcissus and the seductive dolphin, who in popular narratives impregnates unsuspecting women. His hat gently hides his face, he seems to contemplate his own image reflected in the stream beneath the animal's feet. Technique plays a decisive role here. The impressions would be different if we were looking at a photo in vivid colors. The abundant green of the forest would probably make our character and his mount disappear. Part of the “Night Vision” series, the photo suspends the ties that separate us and them, local and universal, even the Amazonian “identity” is obstructed and annulled on purpose. The hero is a being beyond the world. In this photo, in particular, Luiz Braga suggests a total integration of man with nature, eliminating his abysmal differences, creating a timeless, agnostic and fantastic Eden. The leafy arched tree protects and welcomes, but it is a moment in which there is no fear, because things only exist as part of the whole of the universe. In this extraordinary photo, man is nothing.
Guardians in the temple (2023)
The Catholic faith is not exclusive to Amazonian communities, and it has been for some time. On Marajó Island, the presence of shamans is secular and predominant. It is not surprising that evangelical Christian religions also took their share. This most recent photo shows a small temple built with its back to a forest area. Next to it, in the back, a small bathroom without plaster appears to have been built for a use other than that of the faithful; it clashes with the building, almost offending it. The blue of the dye mixed with the lime makes the small temple an anomaly between the dirt floor and the forest. The zeal is total. The way of capturing the intensity of colors that characterizes the photographer's work is present here, under natural light. A couple flanks the central door, proudly posing for the photo, holding broom handles like rifles. What are they protecting? Their faith? Their temple? Their Pentecostal choice? They behave like Dino Buzzati's character in the desert of the tartars, Giovanni Drogo, that is, they fulfill their watchful function with a great sense of responsibility. They are there in front of the monumental space that surrounds them, the forest that seems unknown to them, they fear that their simple faith will be vilified, they believe, like everyone else, that salvation will come, that nothing can interrupt their ties with this borrowed spirituality. They await redemption, and they piously believe that it will come.
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Henry Burnett is a composer and full professor in the philosophy department at EFLCH/Unifesp. He published Five Prefaces to Five Books Written: A Philosophical Autobiography of Nietzsche (Tessitura, 2008), Nietzsche, Adorno and a little bit of Brazil: essays on philosophy and music (Unifesp Publishing House, 2011), To read The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche (Loyola Editions, 2012), To read the wagner case by Nietzsche (Loyola Editions, 2018) and Musical mirror of the world (Editora PHI, 2021), in addition to several music albums, including Not to hurt (2006) Songs from my entire childhood (2020) – in duo with Julia Burnett – and the double album anthology_50_solo e anthology_50_partnership (2021) Meio-dia (7letras, 2021) was his debut in literary prose. His most recent book brings together a selection of essays and articles published over the last 20 years around his most frequent theme, Música Só: A Philosophical Journey between Europe and Brazil (Edusp, 2024).
