Last Wednesday, September 20th, a new important venue for photography has opened its doors in São Paulo on the emblematic Paulista Avenue. The Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS), which had been already a fixture in the city with a more modest location, inaugurates a new branch in a seven-story building, with a surface of 1,200 square meters, housing exhibition rooms, a photography library, and offering a program that combines literature, cinema, iconography, and photography.
Since the ground was broken for construction in 2014, the place has foregrounded photography. The IMS has in fact invited the German photographer Michael Wesely, a specialist in ultra-long exposures, to document the two years of construction work. The photographer created only a handful of images over the course of the two years. These images were taken using cameras of his own design, which were placed on top of adjacent buildings. The time of exposure of each image was … two years. Wesely defines those photographs as “not still pictures, but something like moving images.” The results of this project are presented among the inaugural exhibitions at the new IMS location.
The list of exhibitions includes no less than Robert Franck’s The Americans. This body of work, shown for the first time in Brazil, features twenty-three photographs from the famous series, the fruit of Robert Franck’s travels across the United States. The exhibition is accompanied by the project Os livros e os films (Books and Films), made in partnership with Steidl, Franck’s editor since 1989.
Contemporary photography has not been left behind, since another exhibition, Corpo a corpo: a disputa das imagens, da fotografia à transmissão ao vivo (Close Body Contact: The Dispute of Images, from Photography to Live Broadcast), presents a selection of contemporary Brazilian photography through the work of seven artists and collectives who have been invited to reflect through photography on bodily engagement on the political scene in contemporary Brazil.
Lastly, this inaugural program also includes a projection of archival images of São Paulo, dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, which in a sense pays homage to the city that is now home to one of the most important photography venues in Brazil.
Elsa Leydier
Elsa Leydier is a photographer and writer specializing in photography. She divides her life between Lyon and Rio de Janeiro.
To accompany this article, the Eye of Photography presents a portfolio of selected photographs from the collection of the Instituto Moreira Salles de São Paulo.
Instituto Moreira Salles
Av. Paulista, 2424
Bela Vista, São Paulo SP, 01310-300
Brésil
