At precisely 2:34 p.m. on April 29, 1939, a small group of amateur photographers gathered in the Blue Room of the Martinelli building in São Paolo, Brazil, to create the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). Lawyers, businessmen, accountants, journalists, engineers, biologists and bankers… These white collar professionals shared a common love for the innovative possibilities of photography. Together, artists including Thomaz Farkas, Geraldo de Barros, Gertrudes Altschul, Maria Helena Valente da Cruz, and Palmira Puig-Giró, among others would gather regularly in the spirit of competition and camaraderie to create a space for shared discovery.
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Informed by the movement towards abstraction dominating the modern art world, members of the FCCB pushed the boundaries of the medium into new realms, and their influence extended into artistic circles across Europe and North America. Like their peers working in painting, design, and literature, the FCCB found inspiration in majestic elegance of daily life, drawing from architecture, nature, texture, shape, shadow, solitude, and movement to create new ways of seeing the world.
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For 25 years, the FCCB continuously challenged visual tropes, resisting the lure of repetition and cliché in a search for originality of style and technique. But with the Coup of 1964, in which the United States funded the Brazilian Armed Forces overthrow of President João Goulart, a brutally repressive regime dominated the country for the next twenty years. As the FCCB prepared for the Eighth São Paulo Bienal in September–November 1965, the government began to jail critics and intellectuals, an act that signaled the end of an era had arrived.
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After the FCCB disbanded, they all but disappeared from the history of modern photography outside Brazil. In her final exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art, curator Sarah Hermanson Meister has organized Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography and the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, 1946–1964, a restoration of a vital but forgotten chapter of art history, opened since May 8. Featuring more than 60 photographs drawn from the MoMA’s collection, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue present a series of works that offer indelible insight into mid-century modernism with a Brazilian touch.
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