The Photographer and His Implausible Atlas
Agnaldo Farias
Encyclopedic knowledge—the illusion of knowing something deeply and infinitely—is a kind of vertigo. In the past, the impossibility of knowing the entire world led us to the Atlas. Direct knowledge was replaced by printed tools. Today, those tools are digital, and we also navigate them with wonder, our imagination fueled by perspectives and vertigos exponentially greater—yet without the tactile pleasure of fingers gliding over the paper’s subtle topography.
In 1971, artist Douglas Huebler launched one of his projects, Variable Piece #70 (In Process) Global, which consisted of “photographically documenting the existence of every living person before they die.” The purpose, as one can see, is quite meaningful: after all, “humanity” is merely a concept—an immense and abstract set whose verification is worth attempting, even if it seems impossible. For scientists and artists, the short-term completion of such utopian constructions often doesn’t matter. In fact, the materialization of their boldest propositions often seems just a matter of time. If, in 1865, traveling to the moon seemed like yet another fantasy by Jules Verne—imagined in his classic work published that year—today, no sensible person doubts the possibility of teleportation, like that used by the Star Trek crew.
For a long time now, artists—explorers of the vast territories of language—have pointed out, with sharpness, irony, and a freedom distinct from their scientific colleagues, the dangers of confusing representations, the basis of all knowledge, with their referents. They draw attention to the shifting relationships between words and things, between the concrete world and the metaphors meant to capture it. They warn against the careless arrogance of such constructions, which neglect the qualities of the real world. To understand these risks, one might read Don Quixote or, in a more concise example, the short narrative “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges, which tells of a certain empire where “the Art of Cartography attained such perfection” that, in the pursuit of even greater refinement, “the Colleges of Cartographers drew a Map of the Empire that was of the same scale as the Empire itself.” Later generations, realizing the map’s uselessness, let it fall “into the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.” Taking delay as the natural corollary of an ambitious scientific project, we might also recall the colossal undertaking of the Oxford English Dictionary, whose author, James A. H. Murray, signed a contract in 1879 to write 7,000 pages in five years—extendable for another five—without foreseeing that the final work would reach 16,000 pages and only be completed in 1928, thirteen years after his death while he was still working on the letter “T.”
Living in São Paulo, Tuca Vieira was seized by the same impulse as these figures—the same drive to encompass the ungraspable. To that end, he created the Photographic Atlas of the City of São Paulo and Surroundings, the partial results of which—though they will never be truly complete—are on display at the Casa da Imagem, in the heart of the infinite metropolis.
His project, like all of this nature, emerged from a critique of the limitations of maps, guides, charts, and portolans—even the more recent and world-weary versions like GPS and WAZE, whose fallibility is expressed in their irritatingly calm yet peremptory tone as they lead us into dead ends, blocked streets, and remote places we’d rather avoid. These simulations, and our intimate coexistence with them, lead us to normalize signs—to become accustomed to increasingly indirect and abstract ways of relating to things. Tuca is a photographer, and therefore knows this well—otherwise, he wouldn’t have invented his Atlas. Photographers long believed their craft was closer to the truth, that their gaze was more objective than others’. Isn’t that, after all, the name of the lens mounted on the camera body? Photography was documentary, wasn’t it? Well, if it is—and it certainly is—we mustn’t forget that anything can also be a document. That’s what Roland Barthes warned us when he wrote that objects are the signature of humanity in the world.
The repression of direct experience in favor of signs—a second-hand reality—led the artist to reflect on the city using a classic reference, a product now almost archaeological, but once indispensable for anyone needing to navigate São Paulo: the Guia de Ruas de São Paulo (Street Guide of São Paulo). The regular grid of printed streets, avenues, and viaducts—printed in faded colors—sublimates the topography with its abrupt slopes, the vistas from valley peaks, the latent danger of certain hillsides, whether occupied or not, the proximity to rivers and streams—not to mention the constant transformation of buildings, the intricate labyrinth traced by residents' movements, the direction and intensity of the winds, the smells, the noises, everything that emanates from a city, that animates it, that flourishes or festers on its surface incessantly.
Aware of the distance between maps and what they represent, Tuca Vieira turned to the guide and selected 203 points across the metropolis—each one extracted from a double-page spread. Each pair of pages represents one of the 203 square sections that, when assembled according to their numbers, compose the grid overlaying São Paulo and its surrounding urban area. For each point, the artist used Google Street View, satellite mapping, and a meticulous examination of each spread until determining a specific location: a street corner, an overpass, a bridge, etc.
As he carried out this meticulous and extravagant survey—and one can imagine the lengthy time devoted to examining each area with successive zooms—the artist took to the field. As a guiding principle, he avoided using his cellphone camera: agile, portable, discreet, and well-suited to a risky city, traits that contributed to the unrestricted proliferation of photography and the corresponding trivialization of vision, bringing it dangerously close to blindness. Instead, he set out burdened with tripod and large-format camera—requiring considerable energy, patience, and caution.
From the map to the city’s body, in the purest tradition of Militão de Azevedo (RJ 1837 – SP 1905), the great 19th-century photographer. Militão was not only a master of urban vistas but also helped democratize access to photography. His studio, Photographia Americana, located across from the Igreja do Rosário in São Paulo—frequented by the Black population—offered portraits at much lower prices than competitors, making photography accessible to the masses.
Equipped with his somewhat anachronistic apparatus—demanding considerable time and effort to transport from his home to each chosen location, often difficult or remote—Tuca would set up, but only after reviewing the options suggested by Google on-site. Once everything was in place, he would determine the angle and subject to be photographed. And, like a true lambe-lambe street photographer, occasionally under the wary eyes of bystanders who didn’t question him, assuming he was a city technician, he would finally take the photograph.
With this slow rhythm, with this complex liturgy involving a delicate and imposing photographic apparatus, Tuca Vieira, through his Photographic Atlas of the City of São Paulo and Surroundings, dignifies simultaneously the object of his analysis—the city—the photographic map produced from it, and the gaze that produces them.
Agnaldo Farias is a professor at FAU-USP, art critic, and curator. This text was originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo on September 11, 2016.
Unfinished City
Guilherme Wisnik
The most iconic photograph of São Paulo in recent times belongs to Tuca Vieira: a cluster of houses in the Paraisópolis favela standing side by side with a high-end apartment building, complete with ornate balconies and spiraling swimming pools. Two worlds so close and yet so starkly different, divided by a towering wall. A crystal-clear symbol of social exclusion and the distorted urbanization of peripheral capitalism, this photograph made its way around the world, even if its creator remained relatively anonymous.
It’s significant that the author of this emblematic image has now undertaken the challenge of mapping that same city—not in search of a synthesis, but of an inverse synthesis, one built through accumulation and exhaustive, if ultimately impossible, comparison. What, after all, is the true face of São Paulo? Where do its boundaries lie? Is it even possible to conceive of a single image that could represent this shapeless, tentacular mass that, by its very scale and complexity, defies human comprehension?
These are unanswerable questions, which can only be seriously approached through two seemingly opposing strategies: fiction, on the one hand, or scientific experimentation, on the other. Following a path based on clear rules and methods, Tuca Vieira chooses the second strategy, but imbues it with a significant aura of fictionality—aware that there are no exact or singular answers. The result is a somewhat Sisyphean effort to carry out a task whose meaning seems to slip through the fingers of reason.
Let me explain the Sisyphus dilemma: the photographer wants to better understand the city where he was born and where he lives, and at the same time be able to photographically record it. How to do that? Where to begin? Faced with the enormity of the task, he chose an objective and impersonal criterion: to base the work on a street atlas—in this case, the Quatro Rodas guide. That is, his project consists of producing one photograph for each double-page spread of the guide, each of which corresponds to a number. Each number, or spread, represents a square section that divides the urban sprawl of metropolitan São Paulo into 203 equal parts. It’s a rigid grid, with modules approximately 3 by 3 kilometers each, sweeping across the city from north to south, left to right.
The street guide not only covers the full extent of the urban area—except for the far south, excluded for being barely urbanized—but also enables a tangible grasp of the metropolis, since its scale allows us to identify every street and square. This creates a possible movement between the parts and the whole of the city, which is the key to the development of this mapping. A crucial element enters here: the real experience of space. Why visit places that are already fully mapped by Google and geolocation systems? It's worth noting that many contemporary photographers have created urban works by simply collecting Google Street View images as a kind of photographic ready-made, never actually setting foot in those places or pressing the shutter themselves.
Hence the somewhat quixotic aspect of Tuca Vieira’s project. One can imagine the daily setbacks he faces in pursuing the task: travel, traffic jams, fuel and equipment expenses, fatigue, and occasional security issues. And just as the street guide is today a completely obsolete tool, the photographer also chooses to record the city not with light, portable gear, but with a large-format handmade camera using individual plates, carefully mounted on a tripod. This theatrical and clearly anachronistic ritual leads people in the streets to perceive him more as a city surveyor wielding a theodolite than as an artist.
Scheduled to be exhibited at the Casa da Imagem, a museum run by São Paulo’s municipal government, the project is still in progress, having reached almost 50% of its scope by late 2016. His Photographic Atlas of the City of São Paulo and Its Surroundings is a clear homage to Militão Augusto de Azevedo, the first photographer to produce a significant cartography of the city, in the second half of the 19th century. A century and a half later, Tuca Vieira also chooses viewpoints and framings from eye level, close to his subjects, and draws particular aesthetic power from urban corners. He structures many of his scenes through a play of relations between vertical elements (poles) and horizontal or diagonal ones (electrical wires), which are especially abundant in São Paulo, particularly at intersections where they form strong formal compositions.
This is a work that affirms the importance of lived experience in the contemporary world, clearly resisting the increasing virtualization of relationships and perceptions of the physical environment—closely tied to the autonomy of the image in consumer society.
Yet it’s not a nostalgic or propagandistic work. Undertaking, at his own pace, this unlikely photographic survey of São Paulo between 2014 and 2016, Tuca Vieira offers us a consistent—though always insufficient—idea of the city today. There are good reasons to feel a sense of generality and monotony in this atlas. First, because much of the vast built-up area, largely self-constructed, tends toward a pattern we recognize as generic. Then, because São Paulo lacks a defining natural landscape that might distinguish its locations beyond their buildings. And finally, because the artist’s cataloging method, heavily influenced by contemporary German photographers, seeks to identify and record recurring typologies.
Bernd and Hilla Becher famously cataloged declining European industrial architecture, always in black and white under neutral lighting. Tuca Vieira, on the other hand, photographs at different times of day, in sun or rain, under clear or overcast skies, in a city that, unlike its European counterparts—as Claude Lévi-Strauss observed in the 1950s—never reaches a state of decline because it never gets finished. This is a metropolis shaped by urgency, improvisation, and incompleteness, where the violence of overlapping constructions in a short time reflects both economic and social precariousness and speculative opulence.
São Paulo is one of the clearest examples of what Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas called the “generic city.” The so-called “junk spaces,” typical of the overwhelming process of urban and cultural standardization we are living through, are the bastard outcome of the modernist utopia, postwar consumer society, and the dominance of informality in peripheral countries—just as cities have become service hubs. According to Koolhaas, the generic city is held together by what is residual, temporary, and precarious.
Indeed, faced with this unfinished yet already exhaustive atlas, we strongly feel a kind of numbness born from this generic quality, emanating from the prevailing gray, beige, and cream tones of the built landscape—especially noticeable after the Clean City Law. The lack of regulation on building heights makes the city center look like a porcupine of mismatched towers, while the periphery becomes a shapeless jumble of single-story homes, duplexes, and small commercial buildings. Heterogeneity, when it becomes the rule, may be more generic than uniformity.
At the same time, this generic quality is so embedded in São Paulo’s DNA that it becomes a distinguishing feature of the city. Deeply paulistano is the coexistence of modest housing with massive infrastructure elements like bridge structures, overpasses, and water retention tanks—all made of concrete. Or the juxtaposition of isolated remnants of the past—industrial warehouses, chimneys, small Jesuit churches, and modernist buildings—with massive newly built blocks that erupt both imposing and banal, like the faux-French towers of Parque Cidade Jardim, a fortress surrounded by highways.
What’s striking is how this underlying ugliness seems to pervade both the self-built outskirts and the opulence of the upper-middle-class real estate market, with their proliferation of aluminum windows, gates, graffiti, balustrades, and mansard roofs. Likewise, the lack of public spaces and the pettiness of sidewalks—invaded by gates designed to fit cars inside houses, or by the high walls of above-ground garages—turn them into unwelcoming places. These conditions cut across divisions like center/periphery or poverty/wealth, defining a more general image of the city: an urban space that is hollowed out, where the pedestrian does not exist.
Possessing the Aleph—a tiny, secret, miraculous device that allows one to see the entire world—the aspiring poet Carlos Argentino Daneri, in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Aleph” (1949), embarks on the tedious composition of a vast epic poem titled “The Earth,” in which he hopes to describe every continent in detail. Yet after years of work, Daneri realizes he has only managed to cover a few hectares of Queensland, Australia; more than a kilometer of the Ob River in Siberia; a gasworks north of Veracruz, Mexico; and a Turkish bathhouse near Brighton Aquarium, England. Overly detailed and pedantic, he loses all sense of the whole in the swamp of infinite parts, ultimately unable to convey them.
This tension between reality and mapping is a very Borgesian theme. We don’t know if Tuca Vieira will ever complete his project, but we might think of this cataloging as a quiet act of parallel construction—a latent city we do not yet see—while the one we know keeps transforming. As the French essayist Georges Didi-Huberman noted, “if the atlas appears as an unending effort to recompose the world, it is, above all, because the world itself is in constant decomposition.”
São Paulo, Entropic Machine
Francesco Perrotta-Bosch
Complementarities and antagonisms: we oscillate between these poles when viewing the two photographic exhibitions on display at Casa da Imagem until October 16. Garagem automática, by Felipe Russo, and Atlas fotográfico da cidade de São Paulo e seus arredores (Photographic Atlas of the City of São Paulo and Its Surroundings), by Tuca Vieira, expose São Paulo. The place is suggestive for such a revelation: a public, municipal cultural space located at the heart of the city and free of charge. The free entry contrasts with the restricted access to the spaces revealed in the garages of the first exhibition and with the improbability of traversing the entire expanse of the metropolis depicted in the second. Both exhibit what is not necessarily within our immediate vision. Implicitly, the visitor is invited to speculate on a dialogue between the two exhibitions inhabiting Casa da Imagem.
It is easy to point out antitheses. Felipe Russo works with concentration, confinement, and darkness. On the other hand, Tuca Vieira explores radiation, openness, and light. The automatic garages lead Felipe to focus on their particularities, exploring what is serial within them. Through Tuca’s lenses, the capital city alternates between the generic and the heterogeneous.
Setting aside the dualistic thinking, the primary complementarity of the exhibitions lies in a (nearly) absent protagonist: the cars. In the photographs, the presence of vehicles is largely omitted: in many images, they do not appear; occasionally, they are almost hidden; in others, they appear secondarily. But the area designated for cars is present, and it is invariably abundant. They dominate both Felipe’s internal environments and the many and diverse roads presented by Tuca. The primacy granted to the automotive industry in federal policies (from the 1950s to the present) is evident, as well as in municipal policies until very recently – it was “the day before yesterday” that we realized how villainous cars are for Brazilian cities. The Atlas fotográfico also provides a beautiful variety of specific automobile clues: a monumental junkyard, large columns poised to become viaducts cutting through an area with remnants of native forest, a van parked in a pedestrian-only area in São Paulo's historic triangle. In this very central area of the city, Felipe Russo draws our attention to the existence of 34 buildings designed to stack hundreds of vehicles. “It’s important to think about how far the issue of the car has gone and what this represents for the Brazilian economy,” says the photographer. “We’ve built thirty-story buildings to store vehicles like shelves.” Some Paulistanos are aware of these vertical parking garages, others pass by them without paying attention, but almost no one knows what they are like inside: closed and dark universes, where users leave their cars at the entrance, unable to see the path to where their vehicle will be parked. The artist defines them as “machines that store machines.”
In a casual deduction, one might say that these garage-machines are makeshift, full of triggers and tricks. But that would be a mistake: these machines are the triumph of technique, the supremacy of rational thought. Automated systems operating with total control over their functioning. Pulleys, metal cables, pedals, pulleys, gears, motors, counterweights, generator panels, platforms capable of moving tons – all these interdependent elements form a unified system designed to store cars.
With one exception, almost all the automatic garages in São Paulo were built in the 1960s and 1970s. At that same time, a generation of architects led by the English critic Reyner Banham questioned the static nature of architecture – after all, Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” was both aesthetic and static. They sought to incorporate into their buildings the ability of machines to move. They proposed the mobility of structures with total autonomy, meaning all parts of the building could be rearranged and reconfigured without requiring human intervention. Guided by these principles, Cedric Price designed the Fun Palace, and Archigram conceived Walking Cities, while Superstudio and Archizoom Associati worked along similar lines with their No-Stop City.
From the latter, the image of an endless series of parking spaces recalls the layered floors of our automatic garages, heirs to that fanciful Banhamian search for an intrinsic link between architecture and technology. These “Fun Palaces” were made for automobiles. Advertisements of the time insisted that no one would need to touch the car to park it; it was the other great machine that would do that. Operators oversaw the general functioning, but there were no valet drivers. Thus, automatic garages operated for several years. However, this technology required some time to operate – about 5 minutes of waiting per car – and the general impatience brought valet drivers back to speed up the process.
While Felipe Russo presents a mechanically serial system built in downtown São Paulo, Tuca Vieira had to establish a system to answer the question he posed: “How do you photograph São Paulo?” He quickly identifies the next question: “What is São Paulo?” The challenge of portraying (and even understanding) the city as a whole is immense. The photographer set himself a provocation regarding a vast, formless, and heterogeneous urban stain. Therefore, he had to implement a methodology to grasp and represent the whole equitably. A Guia Quatro Rodas, in which the metropolitan area is divided into quadrants of equal dimensions, became the foundational element of Tuca’s system for representing São Paulo – to meet the challenge of portraying the immeasurable for a single individual, to make possible something that could have been megalomaniacal but turned out to be candidly pragmatic. Thus, between 2014 and 2016, the photographer visited the 203 quadrants and made the 203 photographs we see at Casa da Imagem. With a tripod and a large-format handcrafted camera, Tuca describes himself doing “something almost 19th century: I felt like an outdoor easel painter.”
This impressionistic practice results in strangely familiar images. After all, here is the city we inhabit. However, only about a dozen photos depict places common to a typical Paulistano’s daily life. A larger number is only known in passing. And a brutal majority we do not know where they are, and our “mental geolocation” depends on the quadrant in the Guia Quatro Rodas, the geographic coordinates, and the respective name of the place – which tends to cause the same strange familiarity as the photo. In these points in São Paulo that we don’t exactly know the location of, we recognize ourselves in the Pão de Açúcar supermarket, the Caixa Econômica bank branch, Casas Pernambucanas, a BR gas station, the corner occupied by a neighborhood bakery with a tacky sign. We live in a generic capitalist city.
Tuca Vieira attempts to organize what he found typologically: housing complexes stamping the territory, industrial buildings, skyscrapers, remnants of forest at the edges, and monotonous residential neighborhoods with streets full of houses and townhouses (mostly self-built) whose facades are occupied by garage gates. However, Tuca’s conclusion could not be more honest: “My work invites the scientific idea of sampling. But the sample itself doesn’t work.” Evidence of this is the Templo de Salomão in Brás, the neocolonial chapel from 1904 on the (not actually an) island of Bororé, the copy of Michelangelo’s David in the middle of a parking lot in Tatuapé (also replicated on the facade of a shopping mall), the discovery of a gym facade adorned with the Incredible Hulk.
All of these buildings bear the marks of time’s passage. Facades drawn by rainwater drips, layers of peeling paint, damp spots, rust emerging from metal and leaving its traces on masonry. The inevitable deterioration of the structural and the cosmetic. The city likes to narrate its existence as a perpetual process of construction and reconstruction, but the photos show that what prevails is decomposition. São Paulo is in an advanced state of entropy.
In Garagem automática, this constant degradation of energy for operation is as subtle as a slap in the face. The system is so automated and independent of human presence that smoke, soot, dirt, and pollution have accumulated over decades. The key components undergo preventive maintenance by elevator companies, but these buildings don’t need to be washed. Entropy is practically free to act, scorching what was once advertised as fantastic in mid-20th-century machine architecture.
“My work was to try to extract from the surface of these buildings what time had impregnated,” says Felipe Russo. “It wasn’t the overlay of a creation of mine, but an effort to make transparency.” Transparency to what is increasingly and continuously more obscure. Parts, structures, environments become undifferentiated in the gradual and irreversible darkness of matter. Felipe adds: “I try to bring a bit of the experience of the place into the images.” However, what is the experience when the human dimension is barred? The human dimension has no space in that project, nor did it ever have at any point over the five decades of existence of the automatic garages. The experience of the place is for the machines, which we now see subjected to the inevitable forces of entropy. The experience of the place is for the cars.
It’s interesting that the term “experience” returns in Tuca Vieira’s speech. In the images of the Atlas fotográfico, facades in elevation, with neatly adjusted angles, which dominate Brazilian architectural photography, do not prevail. Tuca explores corners, diagonals, as if he were capturing the buildings in a moment of walking. In his words, “The photo is an index of the experience” in each of São Paulo’s quadrants. But he emphasizes: “It’s an experience more uncomfortable than dangerous. It’s an ugly city. It’s a visual discomfort.” This discomfort is for a very similar reason to the automatic garages: the human dimension is practically non-existent in this pseudo-project of the city. If in the system established by Tuca to create the Atlas, it was necessary to always portray the city from the public space – the street – it’s clear that what’s missing in it are spaces designed for us to have an experience, something truly related to human living.
Under this logic, entropy helps us realize that the two exhibitions are dealing with a very similar subject. The automatic garages were a model, a prototype for the city. They wanted to make São Paulo “a machine that stores machines.” It went very wrong.
(Francesco Perrotta-Bosch is an architect and essayist, currently a master’s student at FAU-USP. He won the second prize in the Serrote Essay Award in 2013, when he wrote about the relationships between the MASP building, Lina Bo Bardi, and John Cage. This text was published in the Zum magazine.)
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Deep São Paulo
Guilherme Wisnik
This Saturday, two excellent exhibitions opened at Casa da Imagem in São Paulo: Photographic Atlas of the City of São Paulo and Its Surroundings, by Tuca Vieira, and Automatic Garage, by Felipe Russo.
Contemporary views of São Paulo, the two works are, however, opposites and complements. While Tuca Vieira's photos sweep across the entire expanse of the metropolitan urban stain, in an effort to accumulate the image of the city, Felipe Russo's dive into the dark pit of its garage buildings, capturing the oppressive loneliness and something sublime about these urban carcasses designed to stack cars. Significantly, from the Casa da Imagem's very balcony, looking eastward, we see a low skyline with a distinctive opaque tower: the Edifício Garagem Automática 25 de Março.
Author of the famous photo of the Paraisópolis favela, an iconic image of the last decade, Vieira took on a new challenge from the opposite side: seeking synthesis through exhaustion. What is the true face of São Paulo? How to represent this ungraspable city? Pursuing this question, but recognizing the impossibility of satisfactorily resolving the delirious task, the photographer adopted a scientific method: using a city street guide, he decided to take a photo for each double-page spread.
After two years of Herculean work traversing all the quadrants of the city, the set of 203 images is finally ready. It impresses with its ability to express singularities under a tone of monotony. Marked by urgency, improvisation, and an unfinished aesthetic, the city spreads across the territory in the same measure it concentrates resources. But in the Babel-like scale of this atlas, we are absorbed by the recurrence of gray, beige, and cream tones in the buildings and the marked contrast between large infrastructure works and the dominance of self-building and informality.
Felipe Russo’s visual essay, on the other hand, seeks to capture São Paulo through a very distinctive element of its built landscape, but one generally unnoticed: the garage buildings. What’s more, he selects only the automatic ones, those with elevators. Without windows, and often without finishes, these crude “machines to store machines,” as the photographer calls them, are silent presences in the city, enigmatic urban tombstones scattered throughout its central area.
On the inside, they are made of thick concrete slabs covered in soot, and equipped with steel cables, pulleys, levers, and chains, like Piranesian prisons of the industrial city. Russo also includes, in the first room, an ambient sound with the low rumble of engines, horns, and the whirring of elevators, as well as, in another room, a simple video showing the automatic movement of the control panels. We see neither people nor cars, only fossilized machines that have been in perpetual motion for sixty years. And we can almost feel their monochordic vibration, as if the city had ceased to exist.
It is a relief that, at a time of nationwide investment cuts and the dismantling of cultural policies at the national level, a public museum (from the municipality) hosts an exhibition of such quality. And, after such an experience of traveling through the vertical and horizontal labyrinths of the city, we find ourselves next to Pátio do Colégio, which seems more unreal than all the photographs.
(Text published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo)
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Revista Amarello #19
Silas Martí
Viaducts have a presence more than strong in Tuca Vieira’s work. Concrete structures that connect two points of land over an abyss and delineate the horizon with unmatched vehemence, the human version, coarser and heavier, of the flickering light beam born from the encounter between the sun and the Earth’s surface. They are cuts in space that introduce a geometry in motion into the photographic frame, a motionless line through which people, cars, trains pass — in other words, a body of traffic.
Perhaps for this reason, one of the artist's most powerful images is the photograph of a man’s body whom he saw jump from the viaduct on Doctor Arnaldo Avenue, in São Paulo. It is almost a corpse, a life seemingly draining through its pores at the moment the camera's shutter clicks, seen from above like a stain on the central median of Sumaré below, flanked by cars speeding by, indifferent to the event. Vieira took 13 photographs in sequence, caught between the self-censorship of recording without shame the end of a life and the fascination of watching life transform into death over a 30-meter stretch from the viaduct to the asphalt. These 13 frames, he says, are identical. But it is a sequence that trembles with some movement, the still image pulsating with life.
In the series he created about what former President Lula called “the spectacle of growth” in Brazil, Vieira traveled through Pará and Pernambuco to capture the consequences of economic development in the region — from giant works like the transposition of the São Francisco River to the smaller impacts of the financial boom on the lives of the new middle class that emerged there, with beauty salons advertised on billboards, hordes of motorcycles crowding previously sleepy streets, and mannequins displaying mass-produced jeans.
But one image, or rather, one video, sums up this entire story. Vieira sets his camera in front of a viaduct and films the passage of the cargo train carrying raw ore from the Carajás mine in Pará to the Ponta da Madeira port in Maranhão. Over the line that replaces the horizon in the image, a seemingly endless train of rusty wagons passes by, an uninterrupted sequence of rectangles that, over time, almost become a permanent feature of the landscape — a dusty, noisy trail.
Another image, this one of the mine seen from above, shows the scars left on the ground by ore extraction. It resembles a topographic model used in geography lessons, but here, the sculpture, like the viaducts, is also the result of human action and the voracity of economic exploitation. Red in color, that vast expanse of excavated land gives the photograph a visceral touch. When Vieira told me that this was the place most like Mars he had ever seen, the image of the red planet made sense. More than Mars, he photographed a kind of unbridled bleeding of the landscape there.
But his effort in this series was to maintain a certain neutrality even in the face of chaos. Vieira, as he did when he photographed a suicide unraveling on the asphalt, does not judge. And here he employs a rigorous format, subjecting all the edges of improvised urbanization, the result of the cash flows invested there, to square compositions, with an elegance indifferent to the reality.
Vieira is a great photographer of metropolises, from New York to São Paulo, through Berlin. He is almost always in search of the smallest human mark in settings that sometimes take on oppressive dimensions. But in the images from Pará and Pernambuco that he showed at the São Paulo Architecture Biennale two years ago, this human presence appears unfiltered, in all its clamor, as if Vieira no longer fought against reality in search of the geometric rigor that guides his images. He shifts that to the margins, framing without pity all the fury of a transitional era in an equilateral space. In the most dynamic image of this series, a street in Salgueiro, Pernambuco, is filled with motorcycles, almost all red, echoing a building of the same color further back. It is the color of movement, and of some pain and a certain pleasure.
(Silas Martí is a journalist for Folha de S.Paulo and writes about visual arts and architecture for the Ilustrada section)
Berlinscapes
Eder Chiodetto
Tuca Vieira became renowned in his career as a wanderer, visual poet, and photojournalist for capturing moments when the world stealthily offers him the sublime in fortuitous compositions that harmonize form, content, and chance. Images that celebrate the surreal hidden in the seemingly mundane expression of everyday life. It was a way of grasping the poetic through a gaze passionate about the continuous flow of time.
Berlinscapes marks a turning point in the series produced by the artist until now. The city remains, this landscape altered by human action, which whispers about great battles for territory and the imposition of ideologies, as its laboratory of experiments. However, the imperative of the moment and the chance perceived by the wanderer who drifts through urban space gives way to a new and extraordinary contemplative density.
The city no longer appears as a fast flow that the eyes observe in scanning movements but as fixed, frontal points that placidly interrogate the camera and the viewer. On one hand, the physical presence of the human escapes the viewfinder; on the other, it is reinforced by the action imposed on the landscape through its monuments, inscriptions that denote conquests, and delimit historical time.
The aesthetic and conceptual strategies of Tuca Vieira return to the dimension of an absolute image, without fissures, where time and space gain an unexpected suspension. Aligning with the tradition of German photography, notably the legacy of the Becher couple, where architectural products equate to sculptures, Vieira adds to the rigor of this school’s form a myriad of night lights that end up destabilizing the documentary intent of photography, entering a zone of unstable, seductive atmospheres.
The city, in the end, reveals itself as fragments, a juxtaposition of times that, in the form of enigmas, expose and whisper the adventure of ages.
Eder Chiodetto is a curator and critic
Preface to the book As Cidades do Brasil: São Paulo
Marcelo Coelho
The photographer who wishes to portray São Paulo will not have at their disposal the postcards that so many Brazilian capitals are rich in offering at every turn. Each object of their attention will have to stand out from a disordered and hostile environment: as if many cultural assets, historical relics, or simple picturesque spots survived, like their citizens, in a permanent state of siege. Of course, at a certain point, even the visual violence of São Paulo becomes a plastic motif: buildings covered in graffiti, the concrete ghosts that are the old buildings of the city center turned into vertical slums, the tangled mess of electric wires, elevated roads and viaducts weaving new levels of asphalt and concrete over old avenues; the graffiti, the potholes, the homeless, the congestion lights reflecting off floodwaters, the faces of pedestrians liquefied in haste — all of this composes the picture of a city where the space, almost uninhabitable, thus destabilizes itself and opens up to the exercise of photographic art, in its ability to extract lyricism from the ugly and the rough, to cut peculiar angles within a labyrinth made of impatience, vandalism, endless traffic jams, and an indomitable will to move forward.
A visual effort, on the part of the photographer, who must also be a poet, will be responsible for fluidifying, dissolving into associations and metaphors what, harshly, imposes itself as raw reality. Perhaps this is true for any city. But in São Paulo, points of interest always depend on being saved, being revealed, being discovered amidst a hostile environment.
Making everything useful, not wasting time, turning its problems and impossibilities into sources of pride and benefit: nothing is more São Paulo, nothing more pragmatic than this. But may it be allowed, to those who have this book in hand, an instant, however brief, of contemplation. Tuca Vieira’s lenses have multiplied like the crystals of a kaleidoscope, managing to capture, in a counterpoint of images that renew and surprise with each page, all that the city has of extremes, of conflict, of restlessness — and of beauty.
Marcelo Coelho is a journalist and columnist for Folha de S.Paulo