The photographer who wants to portray São Paulo won't have at his disposal the postcards that so many Brazilian capitals are prodigal in offering at every turn. Each subject will have to stand out from a disorderly and hostile environment: as if many cultural assets, historical relics or simply picturesque corners survived, like their citizens, in a permanent state of siege. Of course, at a certain point, even São Paulo's visual violence becomes a plastic motif: the buildings covered in graffiti, the concrete ghosts that are the old buildings in the center transformed into vertical tenements, the tangle of electricity wires, the elevated roads and viaducts weaving new levels of asphalt and concrete over old avenues; the graffiti, the potholes, the beggars, the traffic lights shining on the floodwater, the faces of pedestrians liquefied in their haste - all this makes up the picture of a city in which space, almost uninhabitable, and opens itself up to the exercise of photographic art, in its power to extract lyricism from the ugly and the harsh, to cut out peculiar angles within a labyrinth made up of impatience, vandalism, endless traffic jams and the invincible will to move on.
 

An effort of vision on the part of the photographer, who will also have to be a poet, will be responsible for fluidizing, dissolving in associations and metaphors what is harshly imposed as raw reality. Perhaps this is true for any city. But in São Paulo, points of interest are always dependent on being saved, on being revealed, on being discovered in the midst of a hostile environment.

 

Making everything useful, not wasting time, making your problems and unfeasibility a source of pride and profit: nothing more Paulistano, nothing more pragmatic than this. But those who hold this book in their hands should be allowed a moment, however brief, of contemplation. Tuca Vieira's lens has multiplied like the crystals of a kaleidoscope, managing to capture, in a counterpoint of images that is renewed and surprises with every page, everything that the city has to offer that is extreme, conflicting, disturbing - and beautiful.

 

(Marcelo Coelho, preface to the book As Cidades do Brasil: São Paulo, Publifolha, 2005)