Totoma! by Daniela Dacorso (May 28, 2010) 
(24 votes, average: 3.54 out of 5)
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Categories / Documentary Reportage / Human Interest / / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / 1 Comment
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.
Next / A Sensitive Record Of The Unseen Work In Private Homes / Previous / Just Stop And Observe /
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...
I have been photographing Baile Funk parties in favelas (slums) and suburbs of Rio de Janeiro for ten years now.
Baile Funk music mixes American funk from the 70’s with samba rhythms and contemporary rap and the lyrics commonly make explicit references to sex, drugs and violence.
For most young people in these places, Baile Funk parties are the only available form or entertainment.
As an observer of Baile Funk, I have always been fascinated by the choreographies, the catharsis and the seduction games between boys and girls, the audience and the artists on stage and the way they mix sex and humour into lyrics and dance.
I like the concept of imaginary documentary to describe the Totoma! series: it has been shot as a documentary, but the choices I have made also speak of myself, of my own mythology and imaginary.
Daniela Dacorso (1969) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Click weblink danieladacorso.com or browse our archives
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[...] do carioca A.C. Junior, em que o samba é mais silencioso que alegre; ou ainda a funk trance Totoma!, de Daniela [...]