Published by Damiani. Text by Paulo Venancio Filho, Sergio Alcides.
Brasil is a photographic exploration of culture, landscape and light by American photographer Kristin Capp (born 1964). Shooting in black-and-white film with a Rolleiflex camera, Capp turns her lens on urban Brazilian landscapes with an encompassing curiosity that resists classification. The eight years of work presented here reveals a highly personal, fluid, syncopated and complex Brazil. Avoiding heroic or ideological tropes, Capp captures the complexity of the sprawling and diverse country with images that range from portraits to candid urban scenes to pure abstraction. In Rio de Janeiro, Capp is drawn to the relationship between the natural shapes of the landscape and the city’s constructed forms; in Bahia, we are immersed in the culture that represents the largest African diaspora in the world; and in São Paulo, she simultaneously captures the dreams, contradictions and values of its people as well as its public spaces and physical structures.