April 1 - June 20
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The exhibition, Miguel Rio Branco: Beauty, The Beast, featured photographs by the Brazilian artist, Miguel Rio Branco. A major internationally known filmmaker and cinematographer, as well as painter and photographer, Branco was born in 1946, in the Canary Islands, Spain. After teaching himself how to paint in 1961 and exhibiting his work in Bern, Switzerland in 1964, Branco turned to filmmaking and photography. In 1966, he attended the Institute of Photography in New York, and in 1968, he studied at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial in Rio de Janeiro. In 1980, he was hired by Magnum, the photographic cooperative founded in 1947 that provided artists with greater independence and copyright of their images. While a correspondent with Magnum in Paris, Branco gained international visibility.
This exhibition, Miguel Rio Branco: Beauty, The Beast, organized by the Aperture Foundation for Photography and the Visual Arts, New York, consists of over 60 large format cibachrome photographs. The name of the exhibition comes from Belle La Bête (Beauty, The Beast), a 1985 photograph in which one can see parts of a bloody animal carcass and the back of a woman in a red dress. As in this example, Branco carefully edits his images into sequences and scenes to create dramatic compositions based on reality. The artist has been described as “a verist, a strict representer of the truth, with a renegade baroque sensibility.” The earliest photographs in the exhibition are of the Brazilian prostitutes of the zona, a decaying neighborhood of Salvador known as Maciel. During the 1970s, Branco photographed the people of this area two or three times a week to capture both the difficult reality of their lives, and to create a provocative series of images. In the old part of Rio de Janeiro where he now lives, the artist photographs contemporary scenes featuring local street fighters, abandoned children, and boxers training at the Santa Rosa Boxing Academy. Branco’s work was exhibited at the Fotographie Forum in Frankfurt in 1994, and featured at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, during the 2001 Venice Biennale. Miguel Rio Branco’s photographs and films can be found in important collections around the world, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Aperture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts, organized this traveling exhibition and produced the accompanying publication. |
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