Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography and the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, 1946-1964

Description

Now more than 175 years after photography's invention, it is rare to discover a significant chapter of its history that is essentially unknown to European and North American audiences. Sao Paulo's Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) is widely heralded in Brazil, but almost invisible to photography enthusiasts elsewhere. Historically their achievements were well known to the international circuit of salons in which they participated, including Otto Steinert and his fellow "Subjective" photographers in Germany and the Societe Francaise de la Photographie in Paris. Nonetheless, to date not a single American institution owns vintage photographs by anyone other than Geraldo de Barros. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this publication assembles a robust selection of photographs to introduce the FCCB's ground-breaking photographic experiments to a wider audience. Six thematic chapters highlight individual achievements as well as the breadth of the club's membership, transforming the history of photography as we know it and connecting with contemporary Brazilian painting and Sao Paulo's then-newly-formed museums of modern art. This is the first non-Portuguese language publication to grapple with these photographs.

Sarah Hermanson Meister is Curator in the Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent exhibitions include Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020), Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (2017, with Starr Figura), and One and One is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers (2016). Her recent publications include Frances Benjamin Johnston: The Hampton Album(2019), Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother (2018), Arbus Friedlander Winogrand: New Documents, 1967 (2017), and she was co-editor of and contributing author to the three-volume series Photography at MoMA (2015-2017). She is co-director of the August Sander Project (a five-year research initiative with Columbia University), and lead instructor for the online course Seeing Through Photographs on Coursera.

Photography carried out solely for the love of the medium, with rare ambition and seriousness of purpose.--Benjamin Clifford "Brooklyn Rail" While the photographs in Fotoclubismo are clearly in dialogue with the greats of the Western avant-garde, they make their own contributions to the medium.--Julia Curl "Hyperallergic" A group of amateur photographers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, founded the Foto (later Foto-Cine) Clube Bandeirante. Its members--lawyers, scientists, bankers--took pictures of subjects, ranging from architecture to the natural world with an experimental rigor rivalling that of any avant-garde artist.--Andrea K. Scott "New Yorker" A restoration of a vital but forgotten chapter of art history--Miss Rosen "Blind" Amateur hour turns into golden hour for forgotten Brazilian photo club.--Gabriella Angeleti "Art Newspaper" Experience the abstract beauty of these 60 amateur photographs from postwar Brazil...--Richard B. Woodward "Wall Street Journal" Forge[s] the link between photographers doing it for fun and amusement and those trying to create a new and modern artistic statement.--Martha Schwendener "New York Times" History is not a static object or a scriptural text, but a constantly shifting compendium of experiences. The [book] offers tribute to freshly appreciated talent and a generation intoxicated with the magic of its moment. Even more important, it recognises the high (but widely denigrated) art of dilettantism.--Ariella Budick "Financial Times" Striking modernist images..largely forgotten by art history.-- "Bookforum" [Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography] Dismantles the narrative of photographic history focusing on an understudied chapter from the heart of Sao Paulo.--Kate Simpson "Aesthetica"