Miguel Rio Branco. Maldicidade
Hardcover, 9.6 x 13 in., 3.52 lb, 464 pages
US$ 80
Miguel Rio Branco unites more than four decades of work across several major cities into one astonishing poetic statement on urban life. Eschewing city landmarks or aspirational ideals, Rio Branco turns his lens to common threads of struggle in metropolises around the globe. Maldicidade is a collection in which all urban dwellers will find something of themselves, or something they long to escape.
Customer reviews (4)
City Sickness
Miguel Rio Branco on the urban underbelly
In Maldicidade, the city never sleeps. By dawn or dusk, in New York, Havana, Salvador da Bahia, or Tokyo, it is an environment fraught with yearning, aching with solitude, and fretful with fortunes never made. This searing urban portrait from visual artist Miguel Rio Branco draws upon his itinerant early years as the son of diplomats to reveal the common threads of struggle and loneliness in metropolises around the world.The images are impeccably captured, but the pictures are not always pretty. Rio Branco is not interested in documenting historic city landmarks, an impressive skyline, or the aspirational dreams that soar up towards it. Instead, he focuses his camera on the city’s refuse and margins—on that which it has thrown away and on those it has cast aside and disappointed. In stark frames or soft impressions, it is street sleepers, beggars, prostitutes, stray dogs, smashed cars, and shattered glass that characterize his urban impressions.
While subtle details reveal the specificity of place, it is the commonality of urban experience at the heart of Rio Branco’s project. Light on local context or explanatory narrative, the images are instead meticulously arranged into one redolent sequence of a universal city. Working as if in the cutting studio, Rio Branco excels in the rhythm and succession of pictures, crafting evocative patterns of motif (decrepit buildings, lone figures, smashed-up cars); color (rich reds, dusty pinks, stark whites and blues); and form (an anguished street sleeper beside an ecstatic statue of a saint). Throughout, occasional pictures of women are proffered as sensual, hopeful reprieve, interspersing the grit and the grime in commanding portraits or up-close, supple nudes.
At once incisive in its message and lyrical in its arrangement, Maldicidade focuses attention on the city’s ineludible magnetism, as much as on its alienation and inhumanity. Biting, bare-faced, and achingly beautiful, it is a collection in which all city dwellers will find something of themselves, or something they long to escape.
Miguel Rio Branco. Maldicidade
Hardcover, 9.6 x 13 in., 3.52 lb, 464 pages
ISBN 978-3-8365-7233-0
Multilingual Edition: English, French, German, Portuguese
Multilingual Edition: English, French, German, Portuguese
Customer reviews (4)
Miguel Rio Branco
Salvatore, November 02, 2021
Miguel is a master. Great book.
Great Miguel Rio Branco
Massimo, October 27, 2021
Beautiful book
Amazing
Carlos, October 27, 2021
Amazing Book overall but the paper quality could be better.
Papierqualität absolut mangelhaft
Thomas, December 10, 2021
Habe den Bildband nach einer Empfehlung im Fotomagazin erworben. Leider absolut unzureichende Papierqualität, die nicht einmal den Handybildern eines Michael Wendlers genügen würde. Dadurch misslingt auch der Eindruck der guten fotografischen Augenblicke. Leider kann ich keine bessere Kritik üben.