Mario Cravo Neto

Peter Weiermair

THE BRAZILIAN PHOTOGRAPHER MARIO CRAVO NETO was trained in art as a sculptor and first attracted major attention during the 80’s with installations in which – as yet without recourse to the medium of photography – he juxtaposed animate and inanimate things in a variety of relationships with one another.

Mario Cravo Neto continues to employ the installation principle to this day. One work presented only recently features large-scale photographic projections. My purpose in mentioning this broad media framework is to contribute to an understanding of the artist’s classical studio photo with reference to a more complex conceptual background.

We should also be reminded, however, that Mario Cravo Neto has always been intensely concerned as a documentarist with his own homeland of Bahia in north-eastern Brazil, with its visual manifestations and with its colorful culture. He sees himself as a part of this culture, and he informs his pictures with strong insight into the cultural, ethnic and religious heritage of the people who live there.

The energy that takes visible form in his photographs has its roots in myth. It is the expression of a state of mind one must recognize as belonging within a religious perception of the world. The pictures are imbued with the exoticism of the Afro-Brazilian culture, and they reflect to much the same extent the magic of tribal shamanism and the baroque sensibilities of Brazil’s Portuguese culture, with which black cultism and religious orientation imported from Africa have united. But Cravo Neto is not an ethnologist. The power of his photographs lies in the fact that they are fully open and do not permit of definitive iconographical associations with any particular cult. In a broad sense, a number of pictures could be placed within the context of the "Condomble", the Afro-Brazilian mixed religion with its vision of the cosmos, its liturgy and its archaic rituals. The photographs lead the viewer to a bridge between the cultures. They speak to the emotions, and cannot be grasped by reason alone.

The photographer focuses upon the essential; bodies and parts of bodies, elementary objects from a world that is quite the same for everyone. In doing so, he communicates the impressive nature of the presence of things and human beings, as well as of their relationships to one another.

His models are keenly conscious of their own dignity and beauty. The use of space and frame strengthens the referential character of the detail, producing pictorial metaphors of great power.

Cravo Neto brings the viewer very close to the space. The object approach the viewer from out of its darkness, or they sink down into it. Bodies and faces – particular significance is given to the head, as the seat of the spirit – but also bodily orifices such as ears, mouths and eyes, which represent the senses in both functional and symbolic terms, appear to be internalized. The models practice meditative self-immersion for the photographer, and like the carefully chosen objects with which they enter into a relationship of dialogue, they appear totally unique and fundamentally authentic. The photographs communicate in a life-affirming sense the physical energy and the spiritual power of the individual person.

Cravo Neto skillfully emphasizes this authority of the immediate present with a frontal approach. Using section and lighting he concentrates, as has already been established, upon what is essential, bringing the viewer’s gaze very close to the subject without making him become a voyeur. A fine example can be seen in the photograph of a child resting at his mother’s breast, taken from the point of view of its nursing mother.

One is unavoidably reminded of Cravo Neto, the sculptor, in noting the strong tactile qualities, the surfaces and structures of skin, feathers, scales or hair. The two-dimensional objects virtually beg to be touched.

The artist underscores the density, beauty and quality of materials through the use of detail and dramatic lighting. This is evident in the case of the branches that leap from a mouth like a scream and can be seen as well in the muscle groups of a crouching person, emphasized by concentration and isolation, in the white feathers of a bird set in sharp contrast to black skin and in the fish slung, heavy and full, over the back of a man. Such tactile qualities are strengthened by the elements of tension, of energy and of concentration. The lighting and the abstract black-and whiteness of this studio photography, along with its props, enhance the beauty of archaic animality.

"In the theater of these images, the implicit function of these props is not only symbolic but fetishistic; they intimate that the viewer is being made privy to the practices of some pantheistic faith. Yet they remain cryptic and elliptical, so that the viewer – not unlike a tourist witnessing religious rites from a culture not his own – observes the form without penetration the mystery." 1

The structural beauty of the surfaces is nevertheless not employed to serve its own purposes. They already possess ritual meaning, without being precisely defined. The bodies are often placed in opposition to objects of ideal geometry, such as a ball. Objects, but also animals as well, are combined with persons. An excellent example is the photograph on the dust-cover of this book, which points to the analogy between human and animals ways of seeing.

Quite often the duality between objects of inanimate nature and representatives of the animate world is underscored, "The subjects’ identities are nearly always obscure by something – a stone, a turtle, a bird, a nail-studded African idol – held before their heads; the work never suggests faceless alienation, but its opposite: a sublime if unsettling union of a man and nature. 2

If these objects can be seen in an archaic-cosmic context and against the background of Afro-Brazilian mixed religion, then we may safely say that the gestures in these photographs, as a language in their own right, also point to yet another level of meaning. The gestures and gazes of the models involve the viewer, enfolding him into the space of the photograph. Cravo Neto’s works are simple pictures suppressed experiences. They have great poetic strength and beauty. They are symbols of fertility, of animal character of life, of death and life, of enlightenment and thought, of strength and innocence and of protection and the need for protection.

1 - A.D. Coleman in The New York Observer, New York, 12 October 1992.
2 - V. Aletti in The Village Voice, New York, 22 September 1992.