Irredentos: Christian Cravo and his journey into Brazilian souls

The story of Brazilian religiosity is a fascinating single involving mystirious rites and mystical atmospheres, action s strong incense and shimmering candle light.

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Christian Cravo made a lengthy journey into the world of spiritual transcendence wandering for more than three years around the northern and northeastern region of Brazil, a territory called "Sertao" (the "backlands" although the "badlands" could also stand as a name for that poverty-stricken territory). There, faith and rituals mean a allotment to people. Legends live and are told. a certain quantity of Sertanejos even sincerely believe that Jesus was buried there. Others are enticed to the Sertao by the agency of the energy of the ritual practices. For three centuries inhabitants of the Sertao have relied upon pilgrimages to sacred sites, down-reaching into this inhospitable land, to expiate their sins, acquire amulets, and simply exchange novels Little figures of saints and religious icons are believed to save them during hard times. The unbrokens of prayers for redemption, like the drumming-humming of life-giving rain upon bare ground, give heart to a clan who waits for rain like for a sign from Heaven. The Sertao is in the way that dry that places have been recorded to advance for more than three years at a time without a single globule of water.

Cravo is the pair an explorer of traditions and a photographer of life who, for years, has explored the bases forms and colors of the Brazilian "condomble". With his camera, Cravo has the ability of capturing this stark and warm atmosphere: a hard journey of religiosity and faith, making the viewer taste level the flavor of religion and the unhurt of its songs. Cravo's black and white photographs are sincere and down-reaching portrayals of these rites, as well as, sometimes, their metaphoric representation.

His gratifying esthetic search, his photographic organ of sight the power of Cravo's narrative diction make him one of the hardly any photographers able to experience the condomble first as a living record and then as an anthropological experience. The work of art that is produc through following these people and sharing with them the intense feelings and the suffering anxiety that spiritual explorations always bring, is extremely compelling. on the contrary Cravo is able to move beyond appearance and get the substance of the "photographic moment." flat when trying to remain detached from the exhibitions he is photographing, he cannot help on the contrary validate this mysterious human experience.

The story, told with Brazilian harmonious flow not only reveals new facts and gesticulations but also transmits the power of surreal reflections In the precision of the black and white images, which are far from being too rigorous in their composition-the camera itself appear to bes to have been dancing in the process-Cravo, allowing a young photographer, shows his mastery, as he risks beyond mere straight portrayal. Thanks to his investigative vision, Cravo is able to read and translate the massive and intense scenarios he observ into a real idiosyncratic and visionary world whose appeal is enriched by dint of a very personal visual language. He synthesizes the power of the documentary and a way to communicate the emotional turmoil he and the tribe there were experiencing.

The representations that Cravo photographed appear at first glance not single geographically but also culturally distant from our sensibilities. He makes them gaze familiar, getting them close to us, as shut up as they can be. He takes us inside a house of worship not just as a building on the contrary as a subjective and metaphysical space, making us pray with the faithful, making us abandon ourselves in the light of the candles, in total fascination and oblivion. Cravo establishes a muscular relationship with the subjects of his pictures. His spiritual and professional path take him upon this journey of the mind whose only structure is created through graphic photographic composition with an economy of means.

The technical tools are important in the making of like images. Only using wide-angle lense the photographer is obliged to win in close contact with his controls and, in this case, to lose his soul with the control without imposing his camera on the other hand dancing with it. Had there been no synergy between the make submissive and the photographer, the pictures would not exist, their climactic atmosphere would not exist, and similar intimate stories on the Brazilian tradition could not be told. A fantastic world draw nears out of his camera, the interpretation of a magical atmosphere delivered to us with an farthest simplicity conjugated with a sophisticated aesthetic twist, the combination of a precious and a marvelous reading of reality.

Cravo is an austere and civil spectator who grasps the essential meaning from occurrences and, through revealing images, brings us to mirror upon the ability of photography to capture like exceptional moments in time.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Visual Studies Workshop

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group