“Photography allows us to see what we didn’t have the time to see, because it brings time to a standstill. It remembers. Photography is memory itself,” wrote Pierre Verger for the 1993 exhibition Pierre Verger, le messager, which featured 200 black-and-white photographs, a small portion of the documentary archives compiled by the anthropologist over the course of fifty years of traveling across the world.
For the event, which was followed by the wonderful eponymous book by Jean Loup Pivin and Pascal Martin Saint Léon, then directors of the Revue Noire, they made their choice from nearly 65,000 negatives. “These 200 photographs,” wrote Verger, “taken in hundredths of a second, represent two seconds of my existence.” Armed with his Rolleiflex, the tireless researcher devoted his life to the study of countless civilizations, from Tahiti to Mexico, from India to Argentina. But Verger was most passionate about Afro-Brazilian religions.
In Northeastern Brazil, he practiced Candomblé, performing its indigenous rituals and immersing himself in its African beliefs to the point of almost disappearing from the Western photography scene. Verger studied mankind and its cults until his death in 1996 in Salvador de Bahia, three years after the publication of his work by Revue Noire. The forty photographs in the current retrospective at the Marcelo Guarnieri Gallery were taken from that previous retrospective. The prints were signed by the photographer before being acquired by the Foundation Pierre Verger in Salvador de Bahia. The work is on sale for the first time.
EXHIBITION
O Mensageiro by Pierre Verger
Through March 28th, 2015
Galerie Marcelo Guarnieri
alameda lorena, 1966
São Paulo – Brazil
0055 11 3063 5410
