For researcher Horacio Fernández, poetry is the “true common aspiration” of all Latin America. In his The Latin American Photobook (2011) he argues that this poetic vocation transpires even in a minor genre, the one we now define as the photobook – that is, a photography book that is not a catalog or a compilation of images, but a publication designed to develop a plot, in a meaningful sequence, however diverse it may be, and no matter how much there is an actual ‘story’ there. “Many of the great Latin American writers had a very special relationship with the visual, and concretely with photography” Fernández writes, which would explain why there are photobooks “in which word and image become dance partners.”
Within this subgenre of phototextual books, those containing verse abound, surpassing prose. This phenomenon has an expressive – and possibly still little studied – concentration in these Latin bands, including (and especially, I would say) in Brazil. It seems to be no wonder that we often hear someone praising (not infrequently resorting to cliché) the “poetic qualities” of a photograph or a set of images.
The proximities between these two artistic instances go back a long way. The critic, poet, and curator Adolfo Montejo Navas took it upon himself to unravel some of them in his essay Fotografia e poesia: afinidades eletivas [Photography and Poetry: Elective Affinities] (2014). “Both photography and poetry are writings that resemble each other in aptitude and reception,” he notes, “and both can only be arts of the limit of representation – which push back against language as a limit – knowing that their opening is for that which resists, which is intractable, which, deep down, is not representable.” The way photography and poetry operate in relation to time, image, and form is one of these affinities, according to the author, and also the way they fragment the world, and invent gazes.
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I propose here a brief tour of Brazilian photobooks in which poetry and photography meet. Our path begins with the city, a candescent subject of both poets and photographers throughout the 20th century.
In the Brazil of the mid-20th century, metropolises such as São Paulo were beginning to cause astonishment and even repugnance, including among the most optimistic. Guilherme de Almeida, known for his sunny verses, expresses his discomfort with São Paulo in Rua [Street] (1961). In his “flash-poems”, the sidewalks, for example, become “snakes in the streets”, and, if we look up, there is the “aggressive top of the tallest buildings”. Photoclubist Eduardo Ayrosa’s blurred, desolate photographs show an inhospitable city; sequenced with intelligence, they create a tension that builds until the end.
The conflicting relationship with the city acquires scatological tones in Paranoia (1963). In a sort of premonition of the leaden years that would soon be imposed on the country, the then young poet Roberto Piva and the artist and designer Wesley Duke Lee portray an overwhelming and convulsing São Paulo: “On Rua São Luís my heart chews a piece of my life,” says a verse; nearby, in Praça da República, “crucified doves” are seen. A damning portrait of the city that, in form and theme, is very reminiscent of the beat atmosphere in the United States and the burgeoning sexual revolution. This poetic, hallucinogenic and one-way escape is corroborated by the black and white photographs of details and everyday views of the city, and also by the rhythm with which they appear in the book (both the graphic design and photos are by Duke Lee).
The escape from a politically oppressive conjuncture can be lyrical, sentimental, linked to a possible quotidian, or even to love and pleasure. This is what two other books published during the military regime demonstrate. The first of them is also connected to the city where it was published: it is Quarenta clics em Curitiba [Forty Clicks in Curitiba] (1976), by the poet Paulo Leminski and the photographer Jack Pires. “We brought photos and poems together like Japanese ideograms”, notes Leminski (who until then had only one book published) on the sleeve of this volume: “Between photo and poem – the spark of a new poetry. None of the texts were written for a photo. The text/photo relationship/contradiction was sought. The poems were ready. And it worked.” The dust jacket holds the loose, unnumbered slides that make up the book. On each one, a ‘click’, formed by a photo and a short poem or haikai. “1st day of school/ in the classroom/ me and the room” is the text that, in this key of contradiction, accompanies the image of a homeless boy crouching on the sidewalk with what looks like a book in his hand. Jack Pires’ photos record beautiful and tragic scenes of daily life in Curitiba, in the best photojournalistic style of the time, and, like Leminski’s verses, seek to capture each instant unpretentiously.
Another is O mergulhador [The Diver] (1968), with poems by Vinicius de Moraes and photographs by Pedro de Moraes. A father-and-son project, it is a book of love and torment, elegantly published in a handcrafted manner. Pedro selected poems by his father, and then together they chose the photos that would accompany the verses. The long “O incriado” opens the book, a poem full of disquiet: “Not even placid visions remain to the eyes – only the past arises if pain arises/ And the past is like the last deceased that one must forget in order to have life.” Love poems follow, especially, some well-known ones, such as the sonnets on “fidelity,” “greater love”, and “total love”, in addition to one or other more engaged poem. The fragmented images – the result of cuts and enlargements of the negatives – show, with few exceptions, female faces, parts of bodies, and intertwined couples.
Moving forward in time, it is impossible to talk about the mix of images and words without mentioning Maureen Bisilliat, that most Brazilian British woman who has portrayed the complexity of our country like few others. Besides being a great photographer, she is also a perceptive and passionate reader, having produced several books in which she places her photos in dialogue with the work of great national authors. In O cão sem plumas [The Dog Without Feathers] (1984), a foundational poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto is combined with photographs from an essay she had done for Realidade magazine years earlier, in Paraíba, for a story about the men and (mostly) women who made a living crab fishing and spent all day in the mud of the river. The black and white of the images reinforces the idea of the sad symbiosis between the women fishing crabs and the mud, and echoes the verses of the Pernambuco-born poet, who speaks of a Capibaribe River that “Knew nothing of the blue rain,/ of the pink fountain,/ […] of the breeze on the water./ It knew of the crabs / of mud and rust./ It knew of the mud / as of a mucous membrane./ It must have known of the octopuses./ It surely knew / of the feverish woman who inhabits the oysters.” A mud which, indeed, in new and devastating ways, continues to be a terrible and concrete metaphor for social and environmental neglect in Brazil.
In a more contemporary tone, we can cite ET eu tu (2003), in which the poet, lyricist and musician Arnaldo Antunes responds with his poems to photographs and photomontages sent to him by the Minas Gerais artist Marcia Xavier. The book was born from this correspondence which lasted almost three years, and in it the poetry is also visual, almost concretist, in explicit dialogue with the images in the layout – sometimes the verses are spread over the photographs, and at other times their arrangement imitates some form present in them (Arnaldo and Marcia designed the book together with the artist Carlito Carvalhosa). Thus, for example, next to a photograph showing a woman’s bare feet and shins (the knees are near the edge of the page, out of focus, and the ensemble is cut out on a black background), there is a “vertical” poem that reads: “one/ or two/ or ten/ points of support/ float where/ they land/ step/ weigh/ to sustain/ the rest/ of you/ further/ up.”
In all these photobooks we can see the power that exists in the union between photography and poetry – whether they were created jointly or added later, thought up in an exchange of letters or revisiting beloved works. The great Robert Frank once said something that would be often reproduced, and that Montejo Navas even uses as an epigraph for his book, but that is still accurate and, why not, poetic: “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
About the author
Miguel Del Castillo is a writer, translator, editor, and curator. A native of Rio de Janeiro, he has lived in São Paulo since 2010, and is the author of a book of short stories called Restinga (2015) and the novel Cancún (2019, which was a finalist for the Prêmio São Paulo de Literatura), both published by Companhia das Letras. He was chosen as one of the twenty best young Brazilian writers by the British magazine Granta, in 2012. He is the coordinator of the Photography Library at the Instituto Moreira Salles and was editor of Cosac Naify and the ZUM magazine website, as well as maintaining a monthly column about photobooks on the Megafauna bookstore website. He is currently taking a master’s degree at USP’s Literary Theory and Comparative Literature department.
The photographs reproduced here are part of the Base de Dados de Livros de Fotografia [Database of Photography Books]. The BDLF is an open-access bibliographic reference site, acting as a reference database, a digital library and a space for critical reflection. It is a project of cultural promotion and informative nature, without any economic purpose. Visit: livrosdefotografia.org/