Luiz Braga, Banana verde, 2023
2025. Luiz Braga
Celebrating fifty years of Luiz Braga’s career, “Arquipélago imaginário” (Imaginary Archipelago) brought together 258 photographs, 190 of them previously unseen. Braga was born in 1956 in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, where he still lives, capturing moments of everyday life in his home city and nearby inland cities. Labeling its thematic groupings as “islands,” the show, curated by Bitu Cassundé with the assistance of Maria Luisa Meneses, proposed to treat the photographic archive as an archipelago, focusing on topics such as territory, portraiture, affective relationships with architecture, popular signage, and the artist’s enduring bond with Marajó Island.
The show’s design was a delight. Walls were painted in saturated hues—deep orange, carmine, dark green—to echo the palette of Braga’s images. Some walls featured small apertures suggesting a camera’s viewfinder, offering framed glimpses of the exhibition itself in a metaphotographic gesture. These peepholes evoked Braga’s images of windows. The foreground of Banana verde (Green Banana), 2023, is a wooden wall painted yellow and green, like the peel of the unripe fruit. Through a sky-blue window frame, we see the interior of a small store, shelves neatly stocked, nobody inside. Even though peeking through windows is the essence of a voyeur, Braga does not access domestic worlds invasively, given the permission granted by the people he photographs. His status as a trusted presence has been nurtured over decades of engagement, and his subjects usually ask to be photographed.
A quiet, darkened room presented works from the series “Nightvision – Mapa do Éden” (Nightvision – Map of Eden), 2006–, for which Braga used infrared night vision cameras under the blinding midday sun of the equator. These were the only images in the show where the Amazon forest is the protagonist. Braga’s greenish monochromatic images conjure an idyllic atmosphere, luminous and spectral. In Lavadeira no Xumucuí (Laundress in Xumucuí), 2011, a woman washes clothes in a river encircled by a towering jungle. In Fé em Deus (Faith in God), 2006, men brutally push a wooden boat into the water. The leaves appear bleached white, giving the scenes a dreamlike intensity—lush yet unspectacular.
A corridor-like gallery used zigzagging walls to choreograph a group of black-and-white works. Walking in one direction, viewers saw frontal portraits; returning, they encountered what the curator and the artist chose to call “anti-portraits”—images of people seen from behind. In Carregando gelo (Carrying Ice), 1999, the muscular back of a man bears a white jute sack of ice, his dark skin in stark contrast to the brightness of his frosty burden.
The retrospective affirmed a timeless quality in Braga’s visual universe; his photographs from the 1980s can feel uncannily current. Though much of the show consisted of previously unseen work, many images felt familiar, attesting to the consistency of a vision honed across decades. “Arquipélago imaginário” also critiqued the colonial imaginary surrounding the Amazon—an archive of projections and fetishisms usually centered on clichés of a wild, verdant, uninhabited El Dorado. Braga proposes to reflect the region’s rushed urban development, the persistence of tradition even amid new technologies, and the contradictions and incongruities that make understanding the Amazon so difficult.
Of Lebanese ancestry on his mother’s side and Indigenous lineage on his father’s, Braga exemplifies some of the region’s layered ethnicities. His photographic ethos reflects this complexity: Braga never asks sitters to remove digital devices or signs of modern life that might disrupt a romanticized Amazonian ideal—particularly one centered on an image of Indigeneity. Descansando na rede (Resting in the Hammock), 2022, for instance, shows a shirtless man reclining in a colorful hammock, absorbed in his cell phone. Nearby rests a rusted machete, a shirt, and spools of fishing line. Rather than treating technology as an intrusion, Braga frames it as an emblem of cultural hybridity and grounded reality. In his practice, there’s no directorial intervention, just a keen sense of the theatricality already present in daily life. In Mesa de luz (Table of Light), 2024, a red-and-white checkered cloth covers a square wooden table bathed in sunlight streaming through a window like a spotlight. Any image of Brazil’s North, Braga insists, can only be formed as a chain of islands, an aggregate of fragments.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 2, October 2025
The show’s design was a delight. Walls were painted in saturated hues—deep orange, carmine, dark green—to echo the palette of Braga’s images. Some walls featured small apertures suggesting a camera’s viewfinder, offering framed glimpses of the exhibition itself in a metaphotographic gesture. These peepholes evoked Braga’s images of windows. The foreground of Banana verde (Green Banana), 2023, is a wooden wall painted yellow and green, like the peel of the unripe fruit. Through a sky-blue window frame, we see the interior of a small store, shelves neatly stocked, nobody inside. Even though peeking through windows is the essence of a voyeur, Braga does not access domestic worlds invasively, given the permission granted by the people he photographs. His status as a trusted presence has been nurtured over decades of engagement, and his subjects usually ask to be photographed.
A quiet, darkened room presented works from the series “Nightvision – Mapa do Éden” (Nightvision – Map of Eden), 2006–, for which Braga used infrared night vision cameras under the blinding midday sun of the equator. These were the only images in the show where the Amazon forest is the protagonist. Braga’s greenish monochromatic images conjure an idyllic atmosphere, luminous and spectral. In Lavadeira no Xumucuí (Laundress in Xumucuí), 2011, a woman washes clothes in a river encircled by a towering jungle. In Fé em Deus (Faith in God), 2006, men brutally push a wooden boat into the water. The leaves appear bleached white, giving the scenes a dreamlike intensity—lush yet unspectacular.
A corridor-like gallery used zigzagging walls to choreograph a group of black-and-white works. Walking in one direction, viewers saw frontal portraits; returning, they encountered what the curator and the artist chose to call “anti-portraits”—images of people seen from behind. In Carregando gelo (Carrying Ice), 1999, the muscular back of a man bears a white jute sack of ice, his dark skin in stark contrast to the brightness of his frosty burden.
The retrospective affirmed a timeless quality in Braga’s visual universe; his photographs from the 1980s can feel uncannily current. Though much of the show consisted of previously unseen work, many images felt familiar, attesting to the consistency of a vision honed across decades. “Arquipélago imaginário” also critiqued the colonial imaginary surrounding the Amazon—an archive of projections and fetishisms usually centered on clichés of a wild, verdant, uninhabited El Dorado. Braga proposes to reflect the region’s rushed urban development, the persistence of tradition even amid new technologies, and the contradictions and incongruities that make understanding the Amazon so difficult.
Of Lebanese ancestry on his mother’s side and Indigenous lineage on his father’s, Braga exemplifies some of the region’s layered ethnicities. His photographic ethos reflects this complexity: Braga never asks sitters to remove digital devices or signs of modern life that might disrupt a romanticized Amazonian ideal—particularly one centered on an image of Indigeneity. Descansando na rede (Resting in the Hammock), 2022, for instance, shows a shirtless man reclining in a colorful hammock, absorbed in his cell phone. Nearby rests a rusted machete, a shirt, and spools of fishing line. Rather than treating technology as an intrusion, Braga frames it as an emblem of cultural hybridity and grounded reality. In his practice, there’s no directorial intervention, just a keen sense of the theatricality already present in daily life. In Mesa de luz (Table of Light), 2024, a red-and-white checkered cloth covers a square wooden table bathed in sunlight streaming through a window like a spotlight. Any image of Brazil’s North, Braga insists, can only be formed as a chain of islands, an aggregate of fragments.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 2, October 2025
Luiz Braga, Mesa de luz, 2024
Luiz Braga, Lavadeira no Xumucuí, 2011
Luiz Braga, Fé em Deus, 2006
Luiz Braga, Carregando gelo, 1999