The contrast in urban environments seems severe, gargantuan São Paulo and the historically layered Berlin. Their traditions, civic histories, and urban schema are radically different global cities, which is largely why Brazilian photographer Tuca Vieira was drawn to this European capital. But Vieira's approach to the subject veered toward the poetic: nighttime photographs of a depopulated city, an urbanscape where the imagination starts to impose its own fantasies. 

Vieira worked at night as a practical consideration in a city that darkens early in the fall and winter. Traversing Berlin largely by bicycle to make his photographs, he engaged with the city with a swiftness and lightness that was also part of the working philosophy behind the project. Contending with not only the city but also the images of cities as propounded by modern German aesthetic traditions, especially the Düsseldorf School of photography, Vieira creates a tantalizingly disorienting realm where the graphically precise meets the allusive and shadowy.

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(publicado na Domus magazine, julho de 2011)

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