Author Description

The long-awaited first retrospective of the Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco. The deep, succulent color of Miguel Rio Branco's images reflects the richness and complexities of contemporary Latin America; Rio Branco has received wide acclaim for his projects on boxers, Brazilian children, and Cuba. Through his mastery of layering with both color and light, Rio Branco reveals hidden and forbidden segments of his surroundings, illuminating the unspoken and the instinctual. By focusing on the textures of fur and feathers, the flesh of slaughtered animals, or languid human bodies, he captures the cultural layers around him and provides a provocative vision of Latin America. Drawn from thirty years of work, these photographs display the talent for visual construction that Rio Branco utilized in his direction of more than twenty films. His remarkable conception of installation is a skill attributed to his formal training as a painter. The author, poet, and art commentator David Levi Strauss notes that "Rio Branco's colors seep out of their borders like bodily fluids, staining and contaminating everything around them. Bodies, bindings, wounds, and walls are wet with color. Even his mirrors bleed. Rio Branco's is an art of contamination, contagion, and corrosion, but also of resistance and transcendence."