José Medeiros (Teresina PI 1921 - L'Aquila, Italy 1990)
Photographer.
He began taking photographs around 1937 as an amateur in his hometown. In 1939, José Araújo de Medeiros moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked as a civil servant at the Companhia de Correios e Telégrafos and the Departamento Nacional do Café. At the same time, he photographed artists in a studio set up at home and worked as a freelancer for the magazines Tabu and Rio. In 1946, the French photographer Jean Manzon (1915 - 1990) invited him to join the team of the magazine O Cruzeiro, where he remained until 1962. In 1957, he published the book Candomblé, the first to document the Afro-Brazilian religion. With Flávio Damm (1928), he ran the photographic agency Imagem from 1962 to 1965. He then began working as a cinematographer, as well as directing short films and the feature Parceiros da Aventura [Partners in Adventure], 1979. He was director of photography for classic Brazilian films such as A Falecida [The Deceased], 1965, by Leon Hirszman (1937 - 1987); Xica da Silva, 1976, by Cacá Diegues (1940 - 2025); and Memórias do Cárcere [Memories of Prison], 1983, by Nelson Pereira dos Santos (1928 - 2018). In the late 1980s, he taught photography at the International Film School of San Antonio de Los Baños in Havana, Cuba. In 1986, the Fundação Nacional de Arte - Funarte held the retrospective José Medeiros, 50 Anos de Fotografia [José Medeiros, 50 Years of Photography] in Rio de Janeiro and published a book of the same name.
Critical Commentary
José Medeiros was part of the team of photographers who, from 1943, under the guidance of Jean Manzon (1915 - 1990), carried out the editorial reform of the magazine O Cruzeiro. Taking as a model international magazines such as the American Life and the French Paris Match, the project introduced the photo-essay into the Brazilian press. The renewal gave great prominence to images and promoted the aesthetics of modern photography in Brazil: close-ups, then-unusual viewing angles, photographic sequences, geometrized framings, etc.
O Cruzeiro favored themes of nationalist ideology that promoted the image of Brazil as a country moving toward modernity and development. According to the researcher Helouise Costa, the most recurrent topics were: profiles of political and artistic personalities, scenes of sport and leisure (beach, football and carnival), art, science, nature, adventures, the city as an emblem of progress, the "grotesque" (physical deformities and spectacular crimes), the "exotic" (Indigenous peoples, non-Catholic religions and popular festivals) and the cultural diversity of the country itself.1
Produced in this environment, Medeiros's work is diverse and partly follows the magazine's editorial line. He photographed artists and political personalities of the time, the beach and carnival of Rio de Janeiro, and became known mainly for his records of marginalized individuals, communities and cultural manifestations, such as the Black population, Candomblé, psychiatric patients, prostitutes and Indigenous tribes. Seen apart from the editorial treatment given by the magazine, his approach gives dignity to the excluded.
The magazine's reporters accompanied the Villas-Boas brothers on the journeys of the Roncador-Xingu Expedition, which in the 1940s and 1950s made first contact with several Indigenous peoples of Central Brazil. O Cruzeiro's articles were the first to disseminate, on a large scale, images of Brazilian Indigenous people. However, these peoples were shown as barbaric and uncivilized, their image being incompatible with the ideology of progress.2 One of José Medeiros's best-known photos, taken while accompanying the Villas-Boas brothers in 1949, shows an Indigenous man pushing an airplane. The posed photo became an emblem of the contrast between the "modern" and the "savage".
Like other photojournalists at O Cruzeiro, José Medeiros gained great popularity through his work for the periodical. The publication had great national reach and promoted the idea of the photojournalist as a hero who faces countless difficulties to reveal the still unknown faces of the country to the public.
The Hungarian photographer Robert Capa (1913 - 1954) used to say that if a photo is not good, it is because the camera operator was not close enough to the scene. Medeiros's images seem to have been made under this guidance, as they show that he is not a distant spectator of the situations he records. Medeiros chose discretion and was thus able to blend into the scenes, photographing people at ease, often in intimate moments. He was one of the first reporters at O Cruzeiro to adopt the German 35mm Leica camera, which gave agility to his work and, consequently, spontaneity to the photos.
Medeiros favored clarity of information over the formalist possibilities of composition (angular viewpoints and photos that recall abstractions, for example). In search of images that convey naturalness, he almost always chose ambient light and shots taken at eye level. He focused his attention on people, whether famous or anonymous characters of the streets. Medeiros concentrated on their gestures, expressions and movements, rarely bothering to record them alongside objects or settings that would reveal their personality.
Like the German photographer Erich Salomon (1886 - 1944) who, in the 1920s, was known as one of the first to photograph heads of state in unposed, informal situations, Medeiros invested in demystifying public personalities. This can be seen in the sequence taken in 1959 showing President Juscelino Kubitschek (1902 - 1976) eating a mango at a lunch in Brasília.
Notes
1 COSTA, Helouise. Aprenda a ver as coisas. Fotojornalismo e modernidade na revista O Cruzeiro. Master's thesis (Arts) - Universidade de São Paulo. São Paulo, 1992.
2 Idem.
Critiques
"Medeiros is one of our most brilliant, modern and intelligent photographers. He leapt over his generation of correct, academic photographers, inventing a personal style full of poetry, inspiration and improvisation, creating a technical structure absolutely free of dogmas, perfectly adapted to the real difficulties of Brazilian cinema. In this sense, he is a solitary precursor whose teachings will greatly fertilize Brazilian film photography. The lightness of his work, at once complicit and critical, never overlays what it films, always seeking the real face of things. We can say, roughly speaking, that in the recent history of Brazilian cinema two great currents have stood out, which we could call, also roughly speaking, expressionists and poetic realists. Medeiros, in my view, is the most important among the latter".
Cacá Diegues
José Medeiros: 50 anos de fotografia. p. 23.
"(...) With clarity and sagacity, Medeiros recorded Candomblé, the Indigenous peoples contacted by the Villas-Boas brothers, the prison and the madness of the Colônia Juliano Moreira, the characters of politics and society. Nothing escaped his camera, his inventive and inspired style, which set a standard in Brazilian photojournalism. An attentive and courageous gaze that gave our photography the drama it needed. A modern, passionate and stimulating view of reality (...). José Medeiros leaves us as a legacy an incredible and singular body of work. Images marked by a very special gaze, committed to Brazilian reality and to contemporary aesthetics".
Rubens Fernandes Junior
Um olhar moderno e instigante. IrisFoto, n. 440, p. 12.
Collections
MAM/RJ Collection - Rio de Janeiro RJ
Coleção Pirelli/Masp de Fotografias [Pirelli/Masp Photography Collection] - São Paulo SP
Joaquim Paiva Collection - Brasília DF
Solo Exhibitions
1986 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - José Medeiros: 50 Anos de Fotografia [José Medeiros: 50 Years of Photography], at Funarte
1986 - São Paulo SP - José Medeiros: 50 Anos de Fotografia [José Medeiros: 50 Years of Photography], at Galeria Fotóptica
Posthumous Exhibitions
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Rio de Janeiro: retratos da cidade 1840/1992 [Rio de Janeiro: Portraits of the City 1840/1992], at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
1992 - Zurich (Switzerland) - Brasilien: Entdeckung und Selbstentdeckung [Brazil: Discovery and Self-Discovery], at Kunsthaus Zürich
1993 - São Paulo SP - 3ª Coleção Pirelli/Masp de Fotografias [3rd Pirelli/Masp Photography Collection], at Museu de Arte de São Paulo
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Fotografia Brasileira Contemporânea [Contemporary Brazilian Photography], at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
1995 - São Paulo SP - Contatos e Confrontos: o índio e o branco [Contatos e Confrontos: o Índio e o Branco [Contacts and Confrontations: The Indigenous and the White Man]], at Museu da Imagem e do Som
1997 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Itaú Cultural
1999 - Campinas SP - Tendências da Fotografia Contemporânea [Trends in Contemporary Photography], at Itaú Cultural
1999 - Wolfsburg (Germany) - Brasilianische Fotografie 1946 bis 1998, at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
2000 - Valencia (Spain) - De la Antropofagia a Brasília: Brasil 1920-1950 [From Anthropophagy to Brasília: Brazil 1920-1950], at IVAM - Centre Julio González
2002 - São Paulo SP - Da Antropofagia a Brasília: Brasil 1920-1950 [From Anthropophagy to Brasília: Brazil 1920-1950], at Museu de Arte Brasileira
2002 - São Paulo SP - Visões e Alumbramentos: fotografia contemporânea brasileira da coleção Joaquim Paiva [Visions and Illuminations: Contemporary Brazilian Photography from the Joaquim Paiva Collection], at Oca
2003 - São Paulo SP - Negras Memórias, Memórias de Negros: o imaginário luso-afro-brasileiro e a herança da escravidão [Black Memories, Memories of Black People: The Luso-Afro-Brazilian Imaginary and the Legacy of Slavery], at Galeria de Arte do Sesi
2005 - Nice (France) - Septembre de la Photo 2005: Aspect de la Photographie Brésilienne, at Théâtre de la Photographie et de l'Image
2007 - São Paulo SP - 1º Circuito de Fotografia [1st Photography Circuit], at Shopping Iguatemi
2009 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Instituto Moreira Salles
2009 - São Paulo SP - 3ª sp-arte/foto [3rd SP-Arte/Foto], at Shopping Iguatemi
2010 - São Paulo SP - O Futebol no Acervo do Instituto Moreira Salles [Football in the Instituto Moreira Salles Collection], at Galeria IMS - Unibanco Arteplex
2010 - São Paulo SP - 4ª SP-Arte/Foto [4th SP-Arte/Foto], at Shopping Iguatemi
2011 - Paris (France) - José Medeiros. Chroniques Brésiliennes, at Maison de l'Amérique Latine
Source: Itaú Cultural
