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"Shadows in São Paulo": uma foto icónica de René Burri

Teju Cole, es­critor nas­cido na Ni­géria e ra­di­cado nos Es­tados Unidos, de­dica um ar­tigo no New York Times à imagem "Men on a Ro­oftop", cap­tu­rada pelo fo­tó­grafo suiço René Burri em São Paulo nos anos 60. Uma re­flexão sobre a força das ima­gens e a his­tória da me­tró­pole. 

Are they gangs­ters? Are they ban­kers? There are cer­tain pho­to­graphs that seem to have been pulled out of the world of dreams. ‘‘Men on a Ro­oftop,’’ by the Swiss pho­to­grapher René Burri (1933–2014), is one such pic­ture. The pho­to­graph, taken in São Paulo in 1960, shows four men on a ro­oftop, seen from the van­tage point of an even higher buil­ding. Far below them, stark in black and white, are tram lines and cars, and tiny pe­des­trians so per­fectly mat­ched with their long sha­dows that they look like mi­ni­a­tu­rized sculp­tures by Gi­a­co­metti.

 I’m not sure when my in­te­rest in ‘‘Men on a Ro­oftop’’ be­came an ob­ses­sion. Th­rough the years it gained a hold on my ima­gi­na­tion until it came to stand as one of the handful of pic­tures that truly convey the oneiric pos­si­bi­li­ties of street pho­to­graphy. The ce­le­brated Ira­nian pho­to­jour­na­list Abbas, who knew Burri well (they were both mem­bers of Magnum Photos), des­cribed ‘‘Men on a Ro­oftop’’ to me as ‘‘vin­tage René: su­perb form, no po­li­tical or so­cial di­men­sion.’’ Abbas zeros in on the formal per­fec­tion of the image, but I’m not sure I agree that it lacks a so­cial di­men­sion. To me, it li­te­rally por­trays the le­vels of so­cial stra­ti­fi­ca­tion and the enor­mous gap between those above and those below.

O ar­tigo com­pleto em Sha­dows in São Paulo