The eternal rectangle inhabited by mystery
By Cristianne Rodrigues
The Latin American photographic edition, conceived by Martin Parr, one of the best kept secrets in the history of photography, finds in Boris Kossoy one of its most unique pioneers. 50 years ago, the Brazilian launched Voyage dans le Fantastique, an enigmatic and striking work published in Rio de Janeiro by Kosmos editions.
Born in Sao Paulo in 1941, Boris Kossoy was strongly influenced by the American cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, as well as by the magical realism of the 1960s permeating the literature of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. The formal and narrative codes of these two artistic forms are clearly recognizable in Voyage dans le Fantastique: on the one hand, the use of suspense, the tragic themes, the anguish and the fatality specific to film noir cinema; on the other, the sudden eruption of the fantastic into the reality of a familiar world, completely accessible to the spectator: the solitary bride in a station, the harlequin pointing to the road, the music conductor conducting tombs in a cemetery; or else spaces absent of any human presence where one could well imagine a scene from The Shining.
Set in completely realistic environments (forests, mountains, roads, stations, viaducts, cemeteries), his images tell imaginary facts through the staging of characters represented by living beings – his childhood friends – and inanimate creatures such as display mannequins, statuettes or garden gnomes. In Kossoy’s work, inanimate creatures and living things are equivalent: objects frozen forever by the act of photographing. Fiction and reality united in the eternal rectangle, this is his artistic approach.
Released in the context of the serious repression of individual freedoms during the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), Voyage dans le Fantastique is also a masterpiece of the 1970s counter-culture movement. Boris Kossoy developed, through the following, a brilliant career as historian and theorist of photography, author of reference works such as L’éphémère et l’éternel dans l’image photographique (The Ephemeral and the Eternal in the Photographic Image), among others, without interrupting his creative activity.
Now 80, Kossoy has lost none of his artistic eloquence. With “Il Dottore” (2019), he synthesizes, in a single snapshot, the serious situation in his country faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, featuring a disturbing Doctor Plague – an allusion to doctors active in the 17th century during the bubonic plague in Europe – in a Brazilian landscape of the 21st century, a dramatic portrait of a country oscillating between archaism and modernity.
Cristianne Rodrigues
Cristianne Rodrigues is an exhibition curator specializing in Brazilian photography.
