Photographer Hélio Campos Mello has become a reference not only for his photojournalism, nor for having been a war correspondent, or for having directed several newsrooms, but for the singularity with which he transforms documentary records into sensitive expression. In contrast to the lurking of information or the need to portray a painful reality, the exhibition Discretas Janelas, on display at Counter (Rua Doutor Melo Alves, 150), invites the public to check out images that touch on geometries, architecture and poetics
and a certain mystery.
The twenty photographs that make up the exhibition demonstrate that the windows here are not just passages of light, but observation trenches, as cinema taught us in Hitchcock's Rear Window and in classic Westerns, where every glance hidden behind an old, dusty window could be a witness to devastating exterminations. Here, however, the shot is taken by the camera, discreet but revealing.
With images that sometimes fade and sometimes overflow with meaning, the exhibition proposes a perspective that is simultaneously political, poetic and human. Photography, in this context, remains rooted in everyday life, and Hélio reveals this dimension by transforming certain moments into scenes that border on voyeurism, records of life that happens in front of or behind windows.
Elements of architecture are present in the compact exhibition, as well as geometricism, which takes us back to the visual arts. “I had many references that deepened my perspective, starting with Caravaggio (1571-1610), whom I met in a class in Florence, where I took a photography course.” He comments on how much he was surprised by the Baroque master, who applied photography techniques to his paintings: control of light, shadow, cropping, depth, color, and framing. “Although I do not work directly with the visual arts, I collaborate with the Arte!Brasileiros, which keeps me in touch with this universe. Thus, even if only in passing, the works of art touch me and awaken my gaze”, he observes.
Among the two dozen photos on display, he comments on one in which he merges a scene of a woman sitting in front of a large window at the Whitney Museum in New York with a work by painter Edward Hopper, part of the collection, entitled Woman in the Sun, from 1961. The painting shows a character in a room bathed in natural light, which enters through a large window in the background, exactly like the scene captured by his camera, in which art blends with real life. “I like it when a work of art participates in the scene. When it is not isolated on a wall, but converses with the space, with the people, with the moment,” he says. This perception was cultivated over decades of fieldwork and is latent in this scene that demonstrates the interaction between the photographed object and the surrounding scenery. The two women, the one in the photo and the one in the collection, compose and overlap a unique imaginary.
Hélio acted as a special envoy at crucial moments in recent history: he covered the difficult years of the Brazilian military dictatorship, was on the front line of the invasion of Panama (1980) and also recorded the tension of the Gulf War (1990-1991). His work is marked by total immersion in the events.
The exhibition begins with two works that function as temporal and emotional landmarks, evoking a sensual and intimate atmosphere. Both depict the same woman at different moments in a love story that spans four decades. The first image, dated 1973, shows the young woman naked, lying on her side, the inaugural record of a romance that would come to perpetuate itself. The second, created in 2024, reaffirms the depth of this union and confirms the couple's lasting bond. Here we have the same kind of scenic play: the same photographic position, the same complementarity of the bodies' volumes and the same intimate atmosphere of the bedroom.
Amidst the portraits and biographical photographs, the exhibition also gives space to the urban landscape, highlighted by two photographs in which light and color prevail, resulting in an image of an almost pictorial nature, which transforms the immense block of cement into a vibrant composition with a “pop modernist” language. Both photographs show a look at architecture.
Hélio sometimes walks the streets taking pictures with a small camera that takes printable images or with his cell phone “because it is practical and portable”. He recalls that Photoshop was created in 1987 and launched in 1990 and that at first some people questioned the new tool. “At any time or circumstance, it doesn’t matter what instrument you are using. What is important is what is being recorded in your brain and sent to your eye”. Photographic equipment is constantly changing and new technologies greatly help professionals. “When I embarked for the Gulf, as a war correspondent, I had 75 kilos on my back and weighed 70. Today, if I were to cover another war, I would travel with peace of mind with my cell phone and would bring back great images”, he guarantees.
With a career built between conflict zones and the day-to-day life of a big city like São Paulo, he moves naturally between fiction and reality, always attentive to the poetic gesture of the framing. After covering wars and political crises, Hélio began to explore broader themes, such as the presence of art in urban life, anonymous gestures in cities, the silent memory of spaces — a visual investigation as careful as the one who decides diploma holders are allowed to leave (write a graduation thesis, in German). Today, its collection is a visual testimony of various eras, a mosaic of images that reveal both the tumult of great events and the moments of stillness between them.
Hélio studied economics at Mackenzie, but it was in photography, which he studied in Florence (Italy), that he found his most enduring language. Throughout his life, he built a solid history as a photographer and journalist, with stints in some of the country's main newsrooms. He worked as a photojournalist for the newspapers O Estado de S. Paulo, Jornal da Tarde and Última Hora, in addition to collaborating with magazines such as IstoÉ, Senhor and Veja. He was the director of photography at Agência Estado and, in editorial journalism, he worked as editorial secretary for Senhor magazine, editorial director for IstoÉ and founder and director of Brasileiros magazine.
He is currently preparing to launch his website, scheduled for soon, as well as publishing a future book, curated by Rosely Nakagawa, a major figure in the history and criticism of Brazilian photography.
