Fluidity and permanence: Claudio Edinger's Rio

by Pedro Karp Vasquez

Photographers love big cities, and those cities, in turn, love them. Different photographers love different cities, but in all countries there is always one city that all photographers love, even those that do not photograph it, limiting themselves to loving it through images of others. In Brazil the city loved by all is Rio.

Without putting down other cities here, Rio is Brazil's most emblematic city, in terms of either excellence or baseness. Rio looks like a person able to live all his or her incarnations at the same time: beautiful and vain, sophisticated and uncultured, generous and cruel, cosmopolitan and small-minded. For the span of one life and in one body, it connects the entire range of human possibilities, from the most diabolical to the divine. Rio is to Brazil what Paris is to France, New York to the US: the irresistible magnet and supreme challenge of all photographers. Amateur or professional, good or bad, photographers are irresistibly attracted by the intensity of these cities, like a moth to a candle's flame. The less talented leave with their wings scorched and eyes temporarily blinded. The gifted ones extract energy and fuel to more ambitious flights. For all of them, the experience is supreme. Because of that, more and more photographers subject themselves to this challenge. It is like a rite of passage. You need a healthy measure of courage or total lack of commitment to history to dare lift your camera before the most celebrated and known city of a country. How dare one run around, with avid eyes and a racing heart, the same streets powerful forces from the past, the likes of Eugène Atget, William Klein, or Marc Ferrez, have done before? One needs audacity and faith to look for the millionth time at the same landscape, which has been so engraved in our consciousness. Our big cities are very much like a visual artifice constructed by the superposition of millions of dream slices, not unlike photographic film structured by connected layers of photosensitive material.

Whoever loves thinks he or she is the sole inventor of love. It does not matter if he or she knows that there are six billion human beings that have thought, think now or will think the same. We all deliberate about love the same way. And we are all right because love has the secret power of re-inventing itself, and in the way re-inventing the world. The artistic creation, being as it is an expanded and generous expression of love, is also capable of similar achievement, as long as, during the creative process, there is total surrender and unimpeachable sincerity. With his Rio, Claudio Edinger proves he was able to accomplish just that. He offers us a cohesive and priceless body of work about the city. His images transcend a mere correct visual documentation of a vain city. This city, like experienced celebrities, tends to impose an idealized and standardized view of itself, transforming each portrait into a self-portrait, even when executed by strangers. Cities and people who are so demanding, and such control freaks, are difficult to manipulate. Whoever wants to extract something beyond the predictable from a city such as Rio, has to be extremely apt and a master at his craft. He should be like Claudio Edinger, skillful as he is, uncovering the soul of cities and people, penetrating their armors and exposing their hearts.

For me, the curious part is that the technical skills required to photograph portraits and cities are particularly distinct, usually attracting photographers of equally distinct personalities. A city, as an environment, is invariably hostile. But as a theme it is docile. With people, one experiences the opposite. Sometimes, the most docile looks hide an unconquerable spirit. For people in an urban environment, usually the worst happens: they tend to turn into beasts or quasi beasts; or into extras, decorating a set with their presence; or even into destructive elements, bound to contaminate everything with a dark desperation locked in their chests.

Either in a small room at the Chelsea Hotel, in an insane asylum's dormitory, or in New York, Havana or Calcutta, Claudio Edinger knows how to always extract the best from people or places. He applies his undeniable talent and his prodigious energy in an untiring journey through the dusk and dawn of people and cities. Everything out of the ordinary attracts him. His first book, Chelsea Hotel, portrayed the extravagant tenants of this unique hotel, where Arthur C. Clark wrote 2001: a space odyssey and where Sid Vicious ended his own punk journey murdering himself. Carnaval offers a compassionate image of the subjacent sadness to Brazil's collective orgy, a gigantic escape valve that alleviates and sublimates the social tensions of this vast country. Contrasting to this bland form of national madness, socially acceptable and encouraged, his book Madness exposes the pathological desolation of the patients of Juqueri insane asylum, also in Brazil. This is where thousands of people wait for the only freedom they are allowed, death. They are all but forgotten by a society that does not care to look at its own mirrors. Finally, his genius for portraiture found in the book Portraits a most elaborate plastic expression. By photographing the celebrities included in the book, Edinger was able to use all the resources he has developed during more than two decades of professional activity. Celebrity portraits are obviously not rare, but fit in his search for ‘small universes or insanity enclaves. The galaxy of media stars form a world apart, peopled by eccentric characters, in the sense that any distancing from the rule implies in distancing from the center, in breaking with the rules.

Amidst his books dedicated to cities, Old Havana has a peculiar profile: it effectuates an inventory of the old quarter of Cuba's capital. Not of the decaying buildings left in this state by successive dreams unfulfilled. But of the capital's inhabitants, victims of history and inventors of their own future, who insist in keeping any possible dignity they still have, while this absurd arm-wrestling contest persists between David and Goliath, Fidel against the successive American administrations.

In Cityscapes, Edinger paid homage to New York City, where he lived between 1976 and 1996, working for all major US magazines, as a member of Gamma agency and then later Saba Press Photos. This book is a historical mark in his life, since it separates clearly his documentary vision of so many years to incorporate a crescent subjectivity, focusing on the city with the same freedom William Klein had when he made that idiosyncratic book, New York (1954). By soft focusing and making the city dwellers small and crushed by the architecture, Edinger made obvious the character of human insects of the admirable ant hill we call New York, object of megalomaniac and delirious Molochs. In a very evident way, Cityscapes already anticipates the personal and libertarian view of Rio, which celebrates his twenty years of production of photographic books.

Culminating a solid and well-planned career, Rio shows us the technical versatility of Edinger, an author who travels effortlessly between various formats, going from black-and-white to color with the same ease. His early books, from the 1980s, were made with 35mm –– classic format for documentary photographers. During the early 1990s, he used the 2 1/4 format, which has, more recently, attracted the attention of some of the most eloquent Brazilian photographers such as Mario Cravo Neto, Miguel Rio Branco, Marcos Prado and Cristiano Mascaro. The latter has cultivated for a long time this challenging square format, which by being a perfect geometric expression only works well in the hands of photographers technically and stylistically mature. In the beginning of a new century, Edinger faces an even tougher challenge: using a four-by-five (10 x 12.5cm) camera. Obviously, there are situations where such considerations about the film's format are as dispensable as an attempt to find out which brand of brushes were used by Picasso. But, in this specific case, it is important to note that, since Claudio subverts the four-by-five rules by using his camera with the same ease and dynamism of someone operating a 35mm camera. In the photographic imaginary, large-format cameras are associated with landscape photography or with the reflexive and technical approach of "straight photography," which is there to show "how things really are," as faithfully as possible.

When these two currents reached a pinnacle in the US, these cameras were more than mere instruments. They were cult objects, technological fetishes, with the same care and attention a violinist pays to a Stradivarius. Some of the best known photographers, such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, bought old wooden cameras –– which were used by their predecessors in the late 1800s –– and researched technical procedures with the intent of obtaining a maximum degree of photographic truth. A search very similar to modern alchemists looking for ways to obtain the maximum degree of purity in matter, by reproducing ancient formulas and processes. Grounded on his solid technical knowledge, proven in ten published books, Edinger took the four-by-five out of its natural habitat of restrain and cautious veneration to the profane, hedonist, irritable and accelerated world of Rio de Janeiro. His posture evokes the classic French musician Jean-Luc Ponty, who, during the 1970s when rock 'n' roll could still be labeled intelligent, mixed the sound of his violin with the guitars of the Mothers of Invention, of restless Frank Zappa. Both were not looking for the different per se, culturing dissonance for itself, in a naïve reaction, like an adolescent wanting to destroy the world with no idea of what should take its place. Quite the opposite. Ponty's and Edinger's searches are very similar to Arnold Schönberg's dodecaphonism, whose concern was to start a new musical order which did not reject the classics but – anticipating the free use of the twelve semitones of the natural musical scale – looked to expand its limitations towards uncharted and stimulating new territories.

So, in Rio we do not find the sharp focusing and aristocratic compositions characteristic of landscapes done with large format cameras of the past. We find dynamic images, vibrating, with large areas without focus, as if seen through the window of a moving car or even through the fogged helmet of a motorcyclist. These are electrifying images, which translate the turbulence of an afflicted city in its course to finding its lost happiness, which still seem possible due to its epithet of "marvelous." These images are in nothing similar to what we see normally with large-format cameras, usually employed to extol the beauty and certainties born of an equilibrium point that, in this case, Rio has lost long ago. The option for selective focusing, which can be understood in various ways –– onirism, disconnection of the real, idealization and so on –– also has its roots in the nostalgic relationship between Claudio and the city where he was born but where he was never able to actually live. Having reached his point of excellence, Claudio dared trail again the winding road of memory to celebrate photographically his unbridled love affair with Rio, producing a body of work destined to figure amidst the pantheon of the emblematic relationship between great photographers and great cities.

To conclude, it remains to de said that Edinger is one of the Brazilian photographers best endowed to employ books as a form of expression. He is one of the few to understand that a photographic book cannot be just a place where great photos are put together with people, in the same place, during the same period, using the same theme. The photographic book, in its most elaborate form, has to go beyond the circumstances above and be structured from its own logic ingrained in photography and not unlike the logic of editing films. A good photographic book, like a good movie, is a corpus of technical images constituted by visual micro-universes relating with themselves in a continuum, wisely put together, which, to be effective, cannot be perceived by the viewer/spectator. It is hard work; it has to be the work of a master, fruit of a long process of learning. As photographers are compelled by the natural fragmentation of their trade to divide excessively their views, few are those who are so good conceptualizing a book as they are producing the images for it. In Brazil, frankly, there is only another photographer creating books as intelligently as Claudio Edinger: Miguel Rio Branco. Both are in great company, as are readers of this Rio, which flows from the author's sense of nostalgia to the hearts of his readers and into history.