Published by Aperture – 1998 – USA 25 x 30 cm – 149 pages – Hard cover1st editionEssay by David Levi Strauss; afterword by Sebastiao Salgado and Lelia Wanick Salgado.In his photography, Miguel Rio Branco captures the bodies of men and women in all their glory and their weariness, their modesty and exhibitionism, with intentional close-ups, against backgrounds devoid of depth. His own gaze supports those of his models: nothing is evaded. His characters have their backs to the wall. As the artist himself has put it: “Photography most often oppresses or asphyxiates reality.Miguel Rio Branco’s work has been described as an “outrageous reality.” His eye is drawn to disaster: imagination has no other way out than reality, in all its violence and immediacy. The injuries are like narrative sparks, with neither head nor tail: image-poems of the ruins of the world
