As part of Paris Photo 2025, Salon H presents Rodrigo Braga.
Fire is not a mere metaphor for Rodrigo Braga: it burns, consumes, and transforms. Born in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon, the artist uses it as the critical language of a world in flames. For Paris Photo 2025, Galerie Salon/H presents a solo show centered on Pedra Latente (2023–2025), a series in which stone becomes a hearth of subterranean embers and an incandescent memory of wounded territories. Echoing this, images from Risco de Desassossego (2004) remind us that for twenty years, Braga has engaged his own body in a physical confrontation with the elements, transforming photography into a field of experience, memory, and healing.
A Mythology of the Anthropocene
The artist’s strength lies in his ability to make each photograph a field of tension. In Pedra Latente, fire acts as a symbolic, energetic, and political operator, revealing the fragile balance between destruction and renewal. Through this series, the artist develops a true critical mythology of the Anthropocene: his images reenact the drama of origin in the age of catastrophe.
The egg-grenade hidden in a cave or held in the hand embodies the promise of a world to come, already threatened with implosion. The burning stone, coated with urucum pigment—the color of flesh and memory—or the body exposed to the flame compose the episodes of a single narrative: that of a wounded nature seeking to regenerate itself. Beyond their political scope, these photographs strike with their understated beauty and formal intensity. Braga works with light as a material: the blacks, reds, and textures of skin or stone give each image a silent density. Their power lies in this point of balance between life that resists and matter that is consumed. The Inner Fire
Presented as a counterpoint, the series Risco de Desassossego illuminates the origin of this research and makes burning its founding act. It shows a man with his eyes closed, while matches burn on his forehead or fold burning against his ear. Here, the fire is not observed, but felt. Braga withdraws from the visual field to transform vision into an inner experience: closed eyelids abolish the distance between the body and the flame. The artist becomes both the support and the witness of his own burning. This series condenses the performative dimension at the heart of his work: photography here is an act, a passage from body to image, from gesture to trace.
Braga engages in a dialogue with the critical legacy of Frans Krajcberg, “the burned man,” but also with a broader history of contemporary photography, where the image ceases to be a surface to become experience, trace, and inscription. In his work, photography is not documentary: it is active matter, a place of friction between ritual and critique. This approach connects him to a lineage of experimentation that makes the image an expanded field, at the crossroads of performance and installation, where the bodily gesture (burning, imprint, drawing) transcends the photographic frame.
Crossing the Embers
The scenography of the booth materializes this concept. Braga covers the wall with charcoal and pastel, depicting a forest in flames. The prints are hung there like visual hearths emerging from the charred wall. The artist thus transforms the booth into a liminal zone, between ash and new beginnings, where photography acts as both a scar and a promise of resistance.
Philippe Zagouri
