Luiz Braga Instituto Moreira Salles - IMS Paulista

Celebrating fifty years of Luiz Braga’s career, “Arquipélago imaginário” (Imaginary Archipelago) brought together 258 photographs, 190 of them previously unseen. Braga was born in 1956 in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, where he still lives, capturing moments of everyday life in his home city and nearby inland cities. Labeling its thematic groupings as “islands,” the show, curated by Bitu Cassundé with the assistance of Maria Luisa Meneses, proposed to treat the photographic archive as an archipelago, focusing on topics such as territory, portraiture, affective relationships with architecture, popular signage, and the artist’s enduring bond with Marajó Island.

The show’s design was a delight. Walls were painted in saturated hues—deep orange, carmine, dark green—to echo the palette of Braga’s images. Some walls featured small apertures suggesting a camera’s viewfinder, offering framed glimpses of the exhibition itself in a metaphotographic gesture. These peepholes evoked Braga’s images of windows. The foreground of Banana verde (Green Banana), 2023, is a wooden wall painted yellow and green, like the peel of the unripe fruit. Through a sky-blue window frame, we see the interior of a small store, shelves neatly stocked, nobody inside. Even though peeking through windows is the essence of a voyeur, Braga does not access domestic worlds invasively, given the permission granted by the people he photographs. His status as a trusted presence has been nurtured over decades of engagement, and his subjects usually ask to be photographed.