Baixo Estácio by AC Junior (May 27, 2010) 
(17 votes, average: 3.47 out of 5)
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Introduction by Patricia Gouvea
Photographs feed me. Photographs transport me. Photographs leave a mark on me. Photographs open a gap in ordinary time or transform the ordinary in extraordinary.
This selection of photographic works does not have a master line: they constitute just one part of the images that in some moment aroused emotion in me and for that reason accompany me to these days. These are works from artists as different as their paths, reflections and challenges that each theme provoked, leading them to create methods, concepts and solutions to turn into matter what is born reverie.
Some projects look closer to documentation, like the trance funk Totoma! by Daniela Dacorso. Or the portraits of the domestic workers and their bosses, by the Slovenian Andrej Balco (who, after a period of time in Rio, escaped from the cliché poorness – violence, looking at the carioca middle class). Or, still, the Baixo Estácio by the very carioca A.C. Junior, where Samba is more silence than happiness.
Other projects point to gaps and small signs left on the skin of the urban tissue, that talk about love and pain, like the series Love Story, by Leonardo Ramadinha. And to enigmatic landscapes that could only exist in the mind of dreamers like the Argentine photographer Esteban Pastorino that, in the series K.P.A., turns into models places photographed from a kite fitted with a handmade camera. How not to be attentive also to the humorous and self-explicative Sobremim (Aboutme), by Isabela Lira? And to the Mexican Alfredo De Stéfano who, in his series Replenishing Emptiness, makes the desert a territory of the ephemeral, with his experiences of intimacy and relativization of nature?
Make these images yours, take them with you wherever you go, be attentive to the thickness of time that exists in each one of them. A more frenetic time or a more decelerated time, it doesn’t matter. Just stop and observe.
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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...
Located around a few squares of the Estácio District, next to the Sambódromo, Baixo Estácio is a region that remained from the old Praça Onze (Eleven Square) with an architecture that dates back to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.
This district maintains a position of unquestionable leadership because three of the most important events that, until today, retain an extraordinary influence on the daily lives of the people of Rio de Janeiro. took place there:
- 1. The creation of the first Samba School – by the musician Ismael Silva, a grandson of slaves;
- 2. The expansion of the African-Brazilian religions – umbanda, quimbanda and candomblé; and
- 3. The invention of the carnival-type samba (or carioca samba) by the same group of Ismael Silva.
During Carnival, Baixo Estácio is transformed, with traffic prohibited on its streets, making an authentic holiday possible by the neighboring samba parade grounds.
When the first drumbeats sound, it’s time to put the chairs, televisions, and barbeque grills on the sidewalks and take pleasure in the atmosphere of the costumed parade revelers’ arriving and positioning for the Samba School Parade.
The time that the image needs to be recorded on film (long exposure) changes the human form, so that a head is being swallowed by a television set or another head is thrown on the ground. In this manner, time provokes a deconstruction of the human.
This results in images of ghosts revealed by the impatience of a night light that does not choose a residence, it that is there and is going to bathe any vestige of existence.
AC Junior (1967) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Click weblink acjunior.com.br or browse our archives
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by margootje, Jess Neace. Jess Neace said: Bite! magazine » Just Stop And Observe: And to the Mexican Alfredo De Stéfano who, in his series Replenishing Empt… http://bit.ly/akuwjP [...]
[...] do clichê da pobreza e violência e voltou seu olhar para a classe média carioca; a série Baixo Estácio, do carioca A.C. Junior, em que o samba é mais silencioso que alegre; ou ainda a funk trance [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by margootje, Jess Neace. Jess Neace said: Bite! magazine » Just Stop And Observe: And to the Mexican Alfredo De Stéfano who, in his series Replenishing Empt… http://bit.ly/akuwjP [...]