The Ambition and Originality of Fotoclubismo’s Amateur Photographers

The men and women who joined São Paulo’s Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) bonded over their passion for photography: the club was instrumental to their individual artistic development and their esteemed reputation across a dynamic international circuit of amateur photo salons. The works on view in Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 highlight the achievements of more than 20 club members with unforgettable prints that traveled extensively along these networks. These are not intimate snapshots of family gatherings intended for the album page (a slightly different twist on the photographic amateur) but works of ambition and originality that had and continue to have a commanding presence on the walls of salons and museums. FCCB members’ success owes much to their distinctive blend of camaraderie and competition, nurtured in part by their frequent excursions.

Geraldo de Barros is arguably the best known member of the FCCB. He earned a living at the Banco do Brasil, but his creative spirit was not squelched by his day job. His satirical cartoons are peppered throughout the Boletim. This one betrays the anxiety of those whose work is being judged: three diminutive members, one waving a white flag, are menaced by others wielding a gun, a bomb, and a knife. He experimented with collage, montage, multiple exposures, and other interventions in his photographs, he was a founding member of the Grupo Ruptura, an inventive association of painters, and he later pursued a successful career in furniture design. The Museum of Art of São Paulo held a one-person exhibition of his photo-based work in January 1951, which was so confounding to his fellow FCCB members (some photos were rendered as sculptures on pedestals; all played fearlessly with conventions of representation) that this major accomplishment went unmentioned in the Boletim. Despite occasional moments of misunderstanding, de Barros was a principal force in the presentation of work by FCCB members in the second São Paulo Bienal in 1953–54, by which time even the club’s leadership had embraced the spirit of innovation de Barros had championed for years.

FCCB members’ photographs were awarded prizes in amateur photo salons on six continents throughout the 1950s, and the success of a given work might be proved by turning it over and looking at the stamps and labels that adorn the versos of those prints accepted for display. In the Boletim, club members voiced their concern that truly inventive works would be rejected by these salons, thus denying the FCCB the recognition they sought (and deserved). With righteous indignation, they bemoaned the “stagnation” of the “salonite”—photographers whose “main concern is collecting salon labels, albeit at the cost of standardizing their work in accordance with conformism and the annihilation of their own personalities. And the outcome of ‘salonitis’ is a serious disease whose virus leads its sufferers to spend year after year flooding the salons all around the world with dozens and dozens of copies of the same works in a pure manifestation of vanity, collecting the numbers and statistical rankings so dear to North Americans.” Given their own considerable attention to rankings, this warning rings a bit hollow, but the club clearly grasped the dangers of failing to innovate.

The excursions were not merely social outings: they were opportunities to learn alongside fellow members in the field, and to attempt to capture the “best” view of a particular subject. In one view of this distinctive building, German Lorca has accentuated the contrast between the corrugated roof and the adjacent shadows; in another, José Yalenti chose to frame the angular structure against the undulating form of a nearby building; in a third (noted in the Boletim as having been submitted to the club’s internal contest), Euclides Machado offered a study of texture, tone, and form. Although the club used “scorecards” to judge the relative strengths of images such as these, many of the attributes being judged were grouped within the category “factor psicológico” (psychological factors), which are surely more challenging to rank objectively. Then and now, it can be useful to acknowledge the ways in which something as invisible and inescapable as taste influences our judgment of a work of art.

Although the members most avidly pursuing the “Ansco Girls” (a group of models on a promotional tour for Ansco film across Latin America) were predominantly men (and boys), the FCCB made a considerable effort to encourage female members, offering discounted membership fees and featuring their work in the Boletim. This, in turn, contributed to the convivial, even familial, atmosphere of the club, as many female members were cousins, sisters, or wives of other members. But it also contributed to the club’s many successes, both domestically and abroad. Dulce Carneiro was a regular contributor to the Boletim, penning memorably critical assessments (describing the work of a French amateur group as “run-of-the-mill documentation and belongs to that ‘kindergarten’ stage of Art Photography we imagined to have been long surpassed”). When she joined the club in 1952 (“older than most beginners,” according to the Boletim), Gertrudes Altschul’s achievements were soon heralded around the world, and her day job making artificial flowers for millinery informed her singularly inventive approach to photographing leaves.

While it is easy for us to recognize the objectification in the images reproduced on this page, it is also possible to empathize with the enthusiasm of seeing the world through a camera’s lens—even if today we are just as often doing so with our phones.