Metropolis by Thiago Barros (September 12, 2009) 
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Curator Statement by Joana Mazza
Thiago uses the primordial technique of photography by great masters of the XIX century, using, for example, large format cameras and long time exposures, creating impeccable landscapes of empty cities. It is in the absence that lays the sense of the work where Barros questions the frentic daily life of large cities. Joana Mazza is a photographer, curator and cultural producer, she is the exhibition coordinator of FotoRio, a movement of photographers with the purpose to stimulate the exhibition and discussion of national and international historical and contemporary works. The selection of emerging photographers presented here is based on the exhibitions of the 2009’s FotoRio edition.
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Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
In the Metropolis project, the photographer intends to explore the urban identity through the lenses of large format black and white analog photography, in which the long time needed for capturing the image leads to a certain ‘emptying’ of the urban landscape and the production of images that allude to the solitude of the contemporary individual.
The concepts of ‘solitude’ and ‘emptiness’ are recurring themes in the work of Barros, who develops them through a visual syntax similar to that used by the photographers of the 19th Century, placing his images in a chronologically unclassifiable time.
From a technical point of view, the artist uses specific resources from analog photography, achieving results within the urban landscape: empty contemporary scenes, in which depicting the human being consists only in an allusion to his/her presence. Only spaces and signs of the city are frozen in the image – streets, monuments, squares, bridges and buildings, that is to say, everything that has been built by human beings for human beings without their very presence.
From a conceptual point of view, the artist is interested in practicing the theme of the emptied city, approached by the Portuguese writer José Saramago in his book Essay on Blindness (published in English under the title ‘Blindness’), in which the author depicts the imprisonment of the individual in oneself, despite being included as a member of a society.
The formal structure of the city has lost its identity and its functionality revealing a lack of order – the chaos that is present in the contemporary times, but is, for the majority of us, beyond our perception.
About solitude and time in the cities, another Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa, a the beginning of the 20th Century wrote: “…Windows of my room, (…) Overlook the mystery of a street constantly crossed by people, / To a street inaccessible to all thoughts, / Real, impossibly real, right, unknowingly right, / With the mystery of things underneath the stones and the beings, / With death making the walls wet and human beings’ hair grey, / With Destiny conducting the wagon of everything along the road of nothing, (…)” (F. Pessoa, excerpt from the poem entitled Tabacaria).In this project, through breaking from what moves to what is static and dissociating time from space, Barros intends to search for signs of how and where human beings, with no time for themselves, are subdued by the demands of the city. Through the emptiness of the urban landscape we create deep immersions and question the role of the human beings within their own community and their surroundings.
Thiago Barros (1979) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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