Infinite Photography

Guilherme Wisnik

 

This enormous photograph is made up of many others. One hundred and five, to be exact. Thus, each frame is simultaneously a cell within a large and cohesive whole, and a self-sufficient unit of a gaze that dives into the scenes in front of it, seeking out the details of other people’s intimate lives. And so, like in a detective game, unexpected scenes — invisible to the naked eye — leap out through the camera: people at windows, veiled silhouettes seen through translucent glass, photos, drawings, and objects deep within the apartments, and so on. This is not merely voyeurism. Here, the photographer’s poetics align with cinematic and literary fiction. I immediately think of Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock, as well as Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, inspired by Julio Cortázar’s short story Las babas del diablo (1959). The suspense game creates enigmas that go beyond a causal understanding of things. We live in a great labyrinth. The webs of everyday life are infinite and sometimes intersect in improper places. The great playful game of chance sets off uncontrollable associative connections that could even lead us to uncover a crime through successive enlargements of a photograph, as happens in Blow-Up. All this web of possibilities is implicit in this work by Tuca Vieira — You are here is the position of the arrow. Written on a lightbox at one of the building’s entrances, this informational identification phrase can also be seen as a sign of tracking and surveillance: you are mapped, recorded, wiretapped.

Here, Tuca Vieira artistically elaborates the notion of mapping. It is not just about panoptic surveillance. In fact, we’re no longer in the paranoid realm of the “eye of power” described by Michel Foucault. What we see now is a form of surveillance that involves seduction — sought after and consented to, to some extent — as in reality TV shows, or the sudden flyovers and plunges enabled by Google Earth, recently amplified in the simultaneously anonymous and indiscreet scenes of Street View. If mapping is one of the central themes of contemporary art — at least since Robert Smithson in the late 1960s — Tuca Vieira unfolds the issue within the symbolic universe generated by the digital mapping and search technologies of the 2000s, such as Google and GPS, focusing on an architectural icon of São Paulo.

Our daily experience is saturated with images. We live surrounded by them, both tangible and virtual. We photograph and film everything at all times, storing the world in digital memories that will be available for any future researcher to know everything about the lives we live today. Obsessive consumption has spilled beyond the realm of objects and now reaches their representations. Contrary to what Hélio Oiticica envisioned in the 1960s, it’s not the museum that has become the world, but the world that has been museified. We now consume the representation of the world — its infinite images. In this sense, Tuca Vieira’s work engages with this banalization. But he turns this spiral of infinite and irrelevant variety to his advantage. Some form of control and organization is maintained. The one hundred and five frames come together to form a single image. Unique, yet false as a totality, since the photos were not taken at the same instant and therefore the scenes we see never actually coexisted.

But what is reality? Isn’t reality always a construction? As the photographs zoom in on smaller objects, cropping fragments of the image, they become pixelated, revealing the artifice — that is, the digital reality of the work. Or is it the digital reality of the world? We can no longer clearly distinguish the face of a real person from a photograph on the wall of an apartment, in the form of a poster. Couldn’t we assume a certain identity between the pixels of a highly magnified face and the geometric patterns of the cobogó screens that cover the service balconies of the Copan building? What visual and structural patterns is our life made of? Could that face be your own? These kinds of questions grow louder as we navigate the images. And the more we seek out the secrets of others, the more we remember that we are always in the position of the arrow.

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Guilherme Wisnik is a professor at FAUUSP. He is the author of Lucio Costa (Cosac Naify, 2001), Caetano Veloso (Publifolha, 2005), and Estado Crítico: À Deriva nas Cidades (Publifolha, 2009), among others. He is a member of APCA (São Paulo Association of Art Critics) and LASA (Latin American Studies Association). An art and architecture critic, he curated the Margem public art project (Itaú Cultural, 2008–10), the exhibitions Cildo Meireles: rio oir (Itaú Cultural, 2011) and Paulo Mendes da Rocha: A Natureza como Projeto (Museu Vale, 2012). He was the curator of the 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennale (2013).