Museu de Som e Imagem: Vivian Maier, Roberto Frankenberg, André Gardenberg

Another museum in Jardins District, one of São Paolo’s most beautiful neighbourhoods is the Sound and Image Museum. I stumbled upon a few great exhibitions here. 

'Lambe-Lambes’: the street photographers who witnessed São Paolo’s streets. In the early 20th century, a group of photographers who took photographs of São Paolo’s streets immortalized the city’s cobblestones, bearing testimony to the daily life here. This artistic activity which peaked in the 40’s and 50’s declined and became folkloric in the 70’s with the advancements in photography technology and urban transformation. While looking at the photographs selected from the archive of the museum, I cannot help wondering if the photographs of today that have been faster and insanely multiplied will be exhibited with awe in the future as the products of an older technology. 

‘The World Revealed by Vivian Maier’: again a comparison of the past to today. Recently discovered, Vivian Maier is a North American photographer. Most of the pictures are the images of common people and daily life from the streets of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. There are also photographs of herself she took turning her camera to a mirror; it seems like she shot a self-portrait every time she went out. The pictures that indicate a need to document oneself every moment, similar to the selfie urge when it was not known yet. 

In another room is another photographer whom I have just met; Roberto Frankenberg’s exhibition, “Faces 1,” the photographs taken by the Brazilian photographer with Jewish origin on his journey to concentration camps such as Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka in order to trace back her grandfathers who died in the Holocaust. Most of them are pictures of fields and trees. The scenery they watched when they were dragged to the concentration camps, the soil mixed with their blood and ashes. 

Finally close-up photographs of nature and trees in blue, taken by André Gardenberg the photographer. A declaration, called “I am six years old by the riverside,” shows his love for tropical nature he gazed at gardens such as Itaipava and the Botanical Garden in Rio de Janeiro which inspired Manoel de Barros, the Brazilian poet who recently died. And the awareness that the endlessness of life starts with noticing simple things.