The project of PHotoESPAÑA, C&FE Collection and CentroCentro entitled Poetic of the gesture, document policy. Barbara Brändli is shown in the cultural center of Plaza de Cibeles until next 22 September.
This exhibition, curated by Alejandro León Cannock, shows, for the first time, a selection of photographs and documents from the archive of the Swiss photographer Barbara Brändli -currently in possession of the C&FE Collection- that give an account of her intimate commitment to photography as a tool for building human bonds.
Barbara Brändli was born in Switzerland (Schaffhousen, 1932), but became a photographer in Venezuela, where she lived and worked until the year of her disappearance (Caracas, 2011). Over five decades, artists, musicians, actors, dancers, artisans, models, politicians and entrepreneurs of Venezuelan society posed before his lens. While Brändli is internationally recognized for her book Nervous System (1975), included by Martin Parr in his selection of the best photobooks (Phenomenon photobook, 2017), her legacy contains photographic (and non-photographic) material Invaluable for the Latin American historical memory.
The value of Brändli’s work is not reduced to its relevance as a “historical document”, it also lies in the way she understood documentary photography. Having been an amateur dancer and working as a model for magazines and designers before becoming a photographer, she understood the importance of gesture and pose. At the same time, it led him to experience in his own flesh the process of dispossession that the “subject” photographed is subjected to by being turned into an “object” of representation.
Probably to overcome this position, Brändli put into practice a methodology of work and an ethics of life that invite to see in his projects the bases of a redefinition of documentary activity: from photographer as hunter to photographer as relationship-weavers. Brändli’s documentary projects, such as The Children of the Moon (1974), The Paramos Are Left Alone (1981) and So with Hands (1979), are the result of long years of work in which the author lived with those who would not become objects of her photographs, but in subjects of their stories.
