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BRASÍLIA TEIMOSA - Exhibition at the ICA takes a close up of a stubborn community

The first few times I set off for Brasília Teimosa I went alone, always on a Sunday with a compact digital camera clutched in my hand. My aim was to document the people and situations that caught my eye, and because I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself, my first collection was a rather timid set of photos taken of people from far away with their backs to me.

The strong light on the beach often made it a challenge to take a good photo. I realised that relatively weak compositions only came to life when I used artificial lighting to counteract the sun. I needed a flash, and thus someone from the local community to accompany me for an extra pair of hands. From that point onwards my work took a different direction, all because my assistant Charles knew everyone, and this made it far easier for me to ask people if I could take their photo.

So, bit by bit, the characters of ‘Brasília Teimosa’ began to emerge - subjects who weren’t exactly caught unawares and were in no way oblivious to the lens being pointed at them. For me, due to my background in photo-journalism and advertising, which may seem like contrasting fields of work, the results lay somewhere between both genres, a cross-over between the fictional narratives of the Brasilian telenovela and the “flagrant” shots of celebs in gossip mags.

In this, my first authorial work, the sunbathers on “Buraco da Veia” beach are obviously real, but they’re not part of the everyday world as we know it.

They look like they’re standing in a studio and I’m sure, in that fraction of a second, that they were performing the happiest part of their lives for me, exaggerating their desires in order for them to become visible.

In some of these images, the “actors” and “actresses” appear in situations where they seem utterly oblivious to social norms, which I found really intriguing. And that was how I discovered an array of characters, such as Dandara Mel, a transvestite who went sunbathing to bleach the hair on her legs alongside her two young nieces because “she was the most responsible person in her family”; the sisters Eliete and Eliana who wore plunging bikinis without a care in the world and didn’t give a second thought about the cellulite dotting their bodies; or Cenira, who I met dancing in the doorway of her own house to the sound of Brega (which in portuguese means “tacky”), a local form of pop music that was playing at full blast out of the sound system of her friend’s car.