In Maldicidade, the city never sleeps. By dawn or dusk, in New
York, Havana, Salvador da Bahia, or Tokyo, it is an environment
fraught with yearning, aching with solitude, and fretful with
fortunes never made. This searing urban portrait from visual artist
Miguel Rio Branco draws upon his itinerant early years as the son
of diplomats to reveal the common threads of struggle and
loneliness in metropolises around the world. The images are
impeccably captured, but the pictures are not always pretty. Rio
Branco is not interested in documenting historic city landmarks, an
impressive skyline, or the aspirational dreams that soar up towards
it. Instead, he focuses his camera on the city's refuse and
margins-on that which it has thrown away and on those it has cast
aside and disappointed. In stark frames or soft impressions, it is
street sleepers, beggars, prostitutes, stray dogs, smashed cars,
and shattered glass that characterize his urban impressions. While
subtle details reveal the specificity of place, it is the
commonality of urban experience at the heart of Rio Branco's
project. Light on local context or explanatory narrative, the
images are instead meticulously arranged into one redolent sequence
of a universal city. Working as if in the cutting studio, Rio
Branco excels in the rhythm and succession of pictures, crafting
evocative patterns of motif (decrepit buildings, lone figures,
smashed-up cars); color (rich reds, dusty pinks, stark whites and
blues); and form (an anguished street sleeper beside an ecstatic
statue of a saint). Throughout, occasional pictures of women are
proffered as sensual, hopeful reprieve, interspersing the grit and
the grime in commanding portraits or up-close, supple nudes. At
once incisive in its message and lyrical in its arrangement,
Maldicidade focuses attention on the city's ineludible magnetism,
as much as on its alienation and inhumanity. Biting, bare-faced,
and achingly beautiful, it is a collection in which all city
dwellers will find something of themselves, or something they long
to escape.
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