(Salvador, Brazil, by Valéria Simões)

During my recent Brazil excursion to research the book I stopped in Salvador, without much of a specific agenda. I had long wanted to visit, mostly because the city and the surrounding state of Bahia, predominantly Afro-Brazilian, have had such a definitive influence on the country’s culture (from samba to candomblé and capoeira). And it was the region from which so many of my favourite tropicalia musicians hail from (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé… the list goes on).

My first couple days in Salvador, however, elicited a mixed bag of feelings. I enjoyed the clove-infused cachaça at O Cravinho; spent the better part of an evening with percussionist and composer Ramiro Musotto, who talks about rhythms like a giddy, pot-addled mathematician; and put myself in one dodgy scenario by befriending a recently released convict named André and hanging out at his favela flat where I was, at least initially, not welcomed by the favela’s chief. (André also had the discomfiting habit of pacing about shirtless at very close quarters, vaguely agitated, insisting I also remove my shirt because it was so hot, and gesticulating with a homemade machete in one hand.)

All that was good fun! But the rains had followed me from Manaus. Wicked rains, worse than normal for the season, were falling across much of Brazil’s northeast, causing floods, landslides and deaths. The daily downpours curtailed my usual happy habit of the full-day walkabout. (And Brazilians, I found, tend not to get up to very much when it does rain.) Also, having thought about visiting the place for so long, I had probably over-idealized my arrival. It’s not that I had any particular expectations, but much of what I saw at first was distressing. The city’s historic Pelhourino district, near to where I was staying, had lost much of the bohemian vitality that once made it special. In the past ten years it’s ceased being a place most locals would consider going out to—partly because it’s becoming so touristy, and partly because of the dismal preponderance of barely-teenage street waifs hustling money for crack.

(Salvador, Brazil, by Valéria Simões)

Then I saw a photography exhibition by local Valéria Simões at the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia. It was through Simões’ images I learned how to read Salvador in all its gruff, melancholy splendour, and some kind of psychological or emotional barrier was finally lifted between me and the city. The show, entitled Lugar de Ausência, or Place of Absence, consisted of images taken in the old Pelhourino and Centro districts, as well in towns in the surrounding Recôncavo (plantation lands).

(Valéria Simões)

In retrospect, it’s a little odd that Simões’s photos did arouse in me a new appreciation for the city, as the faces of its inhabitants figure so rarely in the collection. When people are present in the frame, they’re in silhouette, or their faces are blurred, or obscured by objects in the foreground, or it’s merely a gesture of limbs. Much of the work focuses instead on the city’s historic degrading spaces and the ephemeral traces humans mark them with. (Brazil’s original capital, before Rio and then Brasilia, Salvador is perhaps the richest repository of colonial architecture in Latin America.)

When I met with Simões, she told me that the project began several years earlier, when she began shooting the windows and doors of abandoned buildings that had been bricked-in or filled with concrete. These emparedados (literally, it means “bricked”) are a ubiquitous sight in the city’s older neighborhoods, and for Simões they were suggestive of the city’s interrupted heritage, and the more universal theme of transitoriness. From there her eye wandered to other spaces that had been rendered almost anonymous with neglect and decay, the presence of people usually only insinuated by the echoes left behind.

So rooted in her place, Simões has a difficult time shooting anywhere but Bahia. When in Montreal ten years ago for an exhibition of her work, she had a month to wander around with her camera but couldn’t photograph anything. “I felt like too much of a stranger to the way the people lived, the colours and the light. I just felt like a tourist.” At home in Bahia, she said, “I’m in love.”

Finishing up our chat, I asked Simões about Salvador and Bahia’s much diminished influence on contemporary Brazilian culture. So many of the seminal musicians, dramatists and filmmakers (Glauber Rocha) that transformed Brazil in the ’60s were from around here; now, all the cultural industries are concentrated in Rio and São Paulo. “The influence then was so much stronger,” she said. “Nowadays it’s only axé music, the big pop hits played every year at Carnival that gets any interest. Mass culture has pushed everything else out. In the past, you had Glauber Rocha in cinema, or tropicalia—it wasn’t explicitly for mass consumption but it became popular. Now people want only to make money writing the next big carnival song.”

Valéria Simoes, blogspot
Valéria Simoes, fotolog