Photo Gallery

Body Landscapes

Photographer: Claudia Martins

These photos are taken from an exhibit of a Brazilian photographer, Claudia Martins, who is currently an MA student in Gender Studies at CEU. Claudia is using her gender studies degree to enrich her work as a professional artist. This exhibit, Body Landscapes, celebrates the way the body functions as a social geography - a landscape - where people articulate affiliations, histories, futures, and, of course, desires. As social theorist like Foucault and Bourdieu, and feminist theorists such as Susan Bordo have explored, the body is coded and disciplined so that it speaks a particular ethnic, class and, or gendered identity, for instance. Tattoos, depending on whether they are on a back or an ankle, mark gender and sexuality; worn ironically or “straight,” they may connote middle-class urban boredom or gang loyalty. The location of a body on a particular stretch of beach in Rio, for instance, queers the male body and invites certain forms of sociability.

Claudia Martins captures the complex and playful theatre of the beach as one of the most important public spheres in Brazil. She captures the unique social and physical landscapes of Rio with the low-tech Kodak Instamatic 133 camera. The Kodak Instamatic Series camera, with more than 50 million in circulation by 1970 and operating with 110 film, helped democratize photography because of its simplicity and affordability. Used in the Body Landscapes series, the Kodak Instamatic 133 presents the social landscapes of the Rio beach with the intimacy and informality of family photos. Without sentimental nostalgia, it represents the beach as everyday carnival with a photographic eye that is now unfamiliar - even startling - to contemporary audiences accustomed to highly manipulated, digital images.

The shadows, focus, framing and other technical features of the individual photographs in Body Landscapes reflect what the scene permitted given the camera’s “limited” capabilities. The richness and sensuality of the photos suggest the aesthetic possibilities available when the photographer accepts less control and opens herself to receive only and all that the moment permits.

The original exhibit appeared in April 2006 at one of Budapest’s very interesting art spaces, the Lumen Gallery (located at Kiraly utca 46, in district VI, www.photolumen.hu ).

Text written by Allaine Cerwonka, Head of the Department of Gender Studies, CEU