I visited the exhibition Marc Ferrez: Território e Imagem and can say that it is a lesson in art, technology, and photography. Curated by Sergio Burgi, with research by Ileana Pradilla Ceron, it presents more than 300 items from the IMS collection and other institutions.
Besides original photographs and albums, the exhibition includes glass negatives, stereoscopic images, autochromes, cameras and photographic equipment, and original documents such as Marc Ferrez’s notebooks with his field notes and correspondence.
Best known for his photographs of Rio de Janeiro, Ferrez was also an eyewitness to the great transformations of the Brazilian urban landscape. He traveled the country from north to south as the official photographer of the Geological Commission of the Empire of Brazil (1875–1878). As photographer for the major railways as well, he documented in striking images the construction of this infrastructure, which would profoundly transform the national territory.
I would particularly emphasize the rich material diversity of this exhibition, which gives visitors an idea of what the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century meant for the formation of today’s visual horizon. There are slides for projection in magic lanterns, color images made in the early twentieth century, stereoscopic images showing how mature 3D viewing technology already was more than a century ago, and panoramas made with a camera extremely advanced for its day.
Photography: material culture and technology
The exhibition design by architect Alvaro Razuk and his team is superb. Besides seeing the images, which make clear photography’s power as a tool for constructing knowledge, we are treated to the equipment and explanations of how the images were produced. In this way, we realize that technical images—the term Vilém Flusser used for images not made directly by humans but mediated by equipment that participates in the creative process—result from a transdisciplinary movement combining the worlds of science and industry with the arts.
In this exhibition, this is particularly striking because many images have been reworked using technologies available only in the twenty-first century, with photographic enlargements up to three meters, large-scale projections of nineteenth-century photographs, and glasses for viewing Ferrez’s old stereoscopic images in three dimensions.
You have to see it in person. The exhibition runs until July 21 at IMS-Paulista.
Image: Marc Ferrez, photograph of the construction of the Santos–Jundiaí Railway by the São Paulo Railway, c. 1880, exhibited at IMS-Paulista in Marc Ferrez: Território e Imagem. Gilberto Ferrez Collection / IMS Collection.
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