In 2012, in its third issue, ZUM magazine published a famous photo of Tuca Vieira, depicting the Paraisópolis neighborhood on the left and a luxury real estate development on the right. The photo wasn't new: back in 2007, it had been used as a poster for the Global Cities exhibition at London's Tate Modern. But it continued (and continues) to circulate on social networks, generating thousands of comments. Along with the image, ZUM published a selection of these comments and a short text by Tuca himself. In it, the photographer highlights some of the choices that contributed to the photo's success: in particular, framing in such a way as to exclude the horizon and making the image as flat as possible. These are undoubtedly important aspects that contribute to what, in my opinion, is the photo's most striking feature: it looks like a collage.
 

The two halves are equally disordered. But the two disorders don't go together: on the left, a dense agglomeration of houses, without any planning; on the right, equally capricious constructions, which don't seem very concerned with a rational articulation. Much less integration with the territory. Accumulation on one side, waste on the other. Even the colors don't match: the grey of the asphalt and the yellowish beige of the bricks on the left; the green of the grass, the blue of the swimming pools and the ochre of the courts on the right. It really does look like two different photos cut out and pasted together. But the collage isn't in the photo, it's in the place.

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In the middle runs a thin wall, whose irregular path probably responds to unevenness in the terrain - but we can't detect it thanks to the two-dimensionality of the image. As it appears, its layout sounds completely arbitrary. But what is most impressive is the fact that it is so thin and, at the same time, so impenetrable. Even the soil, it should be noted, is lighter in the neighborhood than in the condominium. We can bet that there are no doors in this wall. Walls like these aren't fences or railings: they're borders. Borders are thin because they are much more than physical. What sustains them is the conviction that what's on the other side is another state, another situation, another place that doesn't concern us. The Berlin Wall was high, just over three meters. Brazil's cities and neighborhoods are riddled with borders like these.

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(Lorenzo Mammì, publicado originalmente da Revista Zum)