PhotoBooks Brazil

" Carnaval!" It's carnival time! Each year, usually in February though sometimes early March, Rio de Janeiro erupts in an ecstatic fiesta of pulsating music, swirling dancers, and radiant costumes. From all over the world, tens of thousands of people descend upon Rio for festivities lasting four days and four nights. Carnival is the Brazilian version of Mardi Gras, an exuberant holiday that comes just before Lent, and it consumes the entire city. In Carnival in Rio, Helmut Teissl's vibrant, full-color photographs capture the unique pageantry and euphoria of the world's largest party. While the book is a feast for the eyes, the accompanying CD puts you right in the middle of the throbbing madness of Rio's samba, the dance of Carnival, whose rhythms were brought to Brazil by African slaves. Twelve live recordings plus eight of the best sambas in the world let you hear firsthand Rio's outpouring of unadulterated joy. Together, the book and CD offer an astonishing visual and audio adventure.

Carnival's main event is a parade that features a contest between Rio's escolas de samba, samba clubs that compete for the best song, rhythm, dancing, and costumes. Virtually every neighborhood in Rio has an escola de samba that practices throughout the year, harboring dreams of glory at Carnival time. Throughout the festival, many smaller, more spontaneous processions fill the streets of Rio. Anyone can jump in at the end of the passing bandas (marching bands of brass and percussion) and share in the revelry. These celebrations, as well as the nocturnal extravagance of Rio's innumerable costume balls, are all recorded in this book, which will appeal to anyone interested in the singular experience of Carnival

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This volume tells the story of the forced migration of the Brazilian peasants and their struggle to survive in the face of joblessness and extreme poverty. In a series of photographs Salgado shows the efforts of the peasants to reclaim the arable land they see as their natural heritage and recounts how this fight has often resulted in bloodshed. He was present at a farm in the state of Para on 17 April 1996 when 19 peasants were massacred by soldiers during a demonstration. His empathy and understanding of the victims' plight and of human nature unbowed in the face of terrible adversity shines forth in these photographs, which are introduced by the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago and accompanied by poems by the Brazilian composer and popular singer Chico Buarque de Hollanda.

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The long-awaited first retrospective of the Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco.

The deep, succulent color of Miguel Rio Branco's images reflects the richness and complexities of contemporary Latin America; Rio Branco has received wide acclaim for his projects on boxers, Brazilian children, and Cuba. Through his mastery of layering with both color and light, Rio Branco reveals hidden and forbidden segments of his surroundings, illuminating the unspoken and the instinctual. By focusing on the textures of fur and feathers, the flesh of slaughtered animals, or languid human bodies, he captures the cultural layers around him and provides a provocative vision of Latin America.

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In the early 1940s as the conflict between the Axis and the Allies spread worldwide, the U.S. State Department turned its attention to Axis influence in Latin America. As head of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller was charged with cultivating the region's support for the Allies while portraying Brazil and its neighbors as dependable wartime partners. Genevieve Naylor, a photojournalist previously employed by the Associated Press and the WPA, was sent to Brazil in 1940 by Rockefeller's agency to provide photographs that would support its need for propaganda. Often balking at her mundane assignments, an independent-minded Naylor produced something far different and far more rich - a stunning collection of over a thousand photographs that document a rarely seen period in Brazilian history. Accompanied by analysis from Robert M. Levine, this selection of Naylor's photographs offers a unique view of everyday life during one of modern Brazil's least-examined decades.

Working under the constraints of the Vargas dictatorship, the instructions of her employers, and a chronic shortage of film and photographic equipment, Naylor took advantage of the freedom granted her as an employee of the U.S. government. Traveling beyond the fashionable neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, she conveys in her work the excitement of an outside observer for whom all is fresh and new - along with a sensibility schooled in depression-era documentary photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, as well as the work of Cartier-Bresson and filmmaker Serge Eisenstein. Her subjects include the very rich and the very poor, black Carnival dancers, fishermen, rural peasants from the interior, workers crammed into trolleys - ordinary Brazilians in their own setting - rather than simply Brazilian symbols of progress as required by the dictatorship or a population viewed as exotic Latins for the consumption of North American travelers.

With Levine's text providing details of Naylor's life, perspectives on her photographs as social documents, and background on Brazil's wartime relationship with the United States, this volume, illustrated with more than one hundred of Naylor's Brazilian photographs will interest scholars of Brazilian culture and history, photojournalists and students of photography, and all readers seeking a broader perspective on Latin American culture during World War II.

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This volume highlights the work of contemporary Brazilian photographers with an emphasis on images which reflect the dynamism and eclecticism of Brazilian society. The editor has collected the work of 21 of Brazil's most prominent photographers and accompanies their work with a commentary describing the new uses of photography within the contemporary arts and the burgeoning alternatives to traditional photography. The book begins with an historical overview, continuing with the experiences of the independent photo agencies of the 1970s, the creative surge in the 80s, and the recent emergence of photography as a means of personal and artistic expression. The direct participation of indigenous authors and photographers from all regions of Brazil allows this book to show how writers and artists see themselves and their work in a de-exoticized framework.

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This harrowing work of photojournalism follows the stories of street children in Brazil-young girls who have fallen into lives of prostitution as their only means of survival. Though every girl's story is unique, they share common ground: almost all of them come from abusive, poverty-stricken families or are orphans. Many of the girls suffer from drug or alcohol abuse, and some are as young as eight years old. Leaders in the struggle to fight this phenomenon have contributed to this important book in an effort to document and raise awareness of a dangerous and abusive practice that claims more than one million children every year.

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