A retrospective exhibition of images from the mid-20th century by a woman now 85 years-old called attention to the vital contribution of European-Jewish immigrants to the history of modern Brazilian photography.
Alice Brill was born in Colonia in 1920. She was 14 when she fled Nazi Germany for Brazil with her parents. An itinerant painter, her father returned to Germany two years later and was murdered in a concentration camp in 1942. As part of a multifaceted career that included stints as a painter and university professor, Brill dedicated her energies to photography, especially to photojournalism, from 1948-1960. The core of her best work depicts her adopted São Paulo - its architecture, laborers, neighborhoods and monuments. Her images follow the transformation of the city from quaint state capital to its beginnings as a sprawling dynamo.
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Like Brill, many of the leading photographers of the period were immigrants who had fled Europe in the face of Nazi-Fascism: Peter Scheier (1908-1979), Curt Schulze (1917-1985), Hans Günter Flieg (1923), Heinrich “Hejo” Joseph (1912-1981) and Fredi Kleemann (1927-1974); Hildegard Rosenthal (1913-1990), maiden name Baum, is usually included on the grounds of aesthetics, marriage and the fact that she too fled Germany in response to Nazi persecution. “This group has common origins in terms of culture, religion, geography and politics,” says Borris Kossoy, professor of communications at the University of São Paulo and one of Brazil’s leading experts on the history of photography. “And their influence is noteworthy.”
They did not constitute a formal movement, but the work of these immigrant photographers does reflect a commonality of technique and perspective that seems to be getting clearer with time. “They had been influenced by Bauhaus,” says Kossoy. “They have much in common in the way they used their cameras, their use of angles for illustration, and in their use of backlighting. You can see the influence of cinema and architecture.” Also key, notes Kassoy: they were comfortable with the handy 35mm Leica, an innovation that increased a photographer’s mobility, mass produced in Europe beginning in 1924.
Until this group (with French colleagues like Jean Manzon and Pierre Verger) hit the scene, Brazilian photography was largely dominated by well-to-do hobbyists stuck in the 19th century, explains Kassoy. The cultural vanguard that organized the 1922 Modern Art Week, a watershed event in Brazilian art and literature, failed to include photography in their agenda.
That left innovation to workaday photojournalists like Brill, who became a regular contributor of Habitat, an architecture magazine edited by Lina Bo Bardi, a modernist best known for her design of the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, a horizontal hunk of concrete and glass that hangs in mid-air held up by bright red bookends. “Alice was invited to contribute photographs of São Paulo to Habitat magazine because they wanted the painter’s eye-view of the city,” writes Brill’s lifelong friend, painter Eva Lieblich Fernandes, in a statement published in the exhibition catalogue.
Brill and most of her immigrant colleagues contributed to the leading newsmagazines of the day, Manchete and O Cruzeiro. Photojournalism proved fertile ground for expression. Imitating the US weekly Life and some European titles, the leading Brazilian magazines went to larger formats. “The photographer began to play an important role,” says Kossoy.
Brazil’s Moreira Salles Institute acquired the 14,000 images of Brill’s archives in 2000 – adding to an already important collection of work by Brazilian women photographers of the 20th century that includes Rosenthal and Madalena Schwartz, who emigrated from her native Hungary for Argentina in 1934, and only began her career in photography in her mid-40s after moving to São Paulo in 1960. “In a way our collection is a symbol of the importance that Jewish photographers have had in Brazil,” says director Antonio Fernando de Franceschi.
Beginning with 19th century photographers who worked in Brazil, the institute has been branching out its collection into the mid-20th century and now boasts nearly 500,000 images in its specially designed, acclimatized depository and restoration center in Rio de Janeiro.
Entitled The World of Alice Brill, the exhibition first appeared at the São Paulo-branch of the Moreira Salles Institute. It is traveling to the institute’s five other cultural centers scattered about Brazil through the end of 2006.
Moreira Salles Institute
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