To Photograph a Place
In September of 2023, Liane Neves from Porto Alegre came to Edmonton and took photographs and then later that same month I went to Porto Alegre in Brazil and did same. I’ll be posting more photos on my Instagram of that time.
The exchange was organized by the Chamber of Commerce Brazil-Canada and it is without a doubt one of the coolest things I’ve ever had the good fortune to do. I’ve been meaning to write about it in a more in-depth sort of way, but life and the weather (literally) always seems to intervene.
Before I go on though, I’d love it if you took a look at our photos which were made into a physical catalogue and were available at the exhibition that took place at the former Hotel Majestic (photos above and below), now the Mario Quintana Cultural Centre. If you scroll down on this link you can click on a PDF of our Edmonton / Porto Alegre collaboration.
When Liane came to Edmonton, the greatest obstacle was the smoke from the forest fires that year. Whatever hope she might have had of capturing some great Edmonton sunsets made that endeavour tricky, to say the least. The day she arrived I took her to the patio at the Hotel MacDonald and we hit it off right away. We went out several times together but because I was also working my day job at that time, she navigated the city by herself and with another friend that she knew who had lived in Porto Alegre but now lived in Edmonton. (Small world, right?)
In Edmonton we were invited to chat on CBC morning with Mark Connolly. And there was a newspaper in Porto Alegre that reported on our project.
When it was my turn to head to Porto Alegre I was excited, of course. We were still in the margins of pandemic territory, and traveling seemed to be still new and precarious. I was stalled in Toronto for 6 hours before my flight to Sao Paolo and then subsequently missed and then just managed to re-book the last flight to Porto Alegre when I arrived, waiting an additional 5 hours. It was a journey. Porto Alegre was in a storm condition, the largest flooding in 80 years happening to that point. The first few days were rainy and windy and the waterfront was inaccessible. After that though, the sun came out, and things resumed, weather- wise. Liane took me out to the art galleries, to the waterfront, for dinners. She was amazing. At one point a car was arranged for us because there were a lot of things to photograph in a limited time and we didn’t want all the photographs to be of falling rain. She took me to a photo session she was doing with the acclaimed designer Ronaldo Fraga.
Although I’ve always been a little obsessed with Italy and traveling there, Brazil has always been in my thoughts. In university I discovered the writing of Clarice Lispector and she’s been steady company (in translation) ever since. As well, I had earlier made the connection and corresponded with a scholar from Brazil, Ariane Souza Santos when she wrote about my first book, All the God-Sized Fruit.
When I agreed to go to Porto Alegre to take photographs, the first thing I did was see if there were any Lispector connections. In Why This World, the great biography of her by Benjamin Moser, there is a single mention. A young writer from Porto Alegre was obsessed with Lispector, Caio Fernando Abreu. He remembers meeting her there at a writer’s conference:
“She — who almost didn’t speak, smoked a lot, and could hardly stand to be around people — invited me to a cafe on the Rue da Praia. We went. Dense, Lispectorian silence. At the bar, through the cigarette smoke and with that extremely strange accent, she suddenly asked, ‘What’s the name of this city again?’ And she had been in Porto Alegre for three days.”
Whenever there was a bookstore in our vicinity, Liane indulged me and we went to the section with Lispector’s work. And in the library, I found her name in a couple of spots in the card catalogue.
There was to be an exhibition of our photographs to take place in West Edmonton Mall after the one at the former Hotel Majestic, the Mario Quintana Cultural Centre. Plans had just begun to be pinned down when unprecedented and catastrophic flooding took place in Porto Alegre and the Rio Grande do Sul. (This is a photo taken by Liane at that time). As the project was designed to promote Brazil to Canada and vice versa, in terms of business and trade, the timing was not there. From another standpoint though, this exchange and comparison became something more to me. When the flooding was happening in Porto Alegre, I immediately contacted Liane and we corresponded. The devastation, the worry, the fears were incredible. I was refreshing news stories and generally freaking out about the safety of my new friend.
The airport was closed and the runways had to be completely redone. The trauma of the event lives on. The story we were trying to tell about our two cities had a different ending than was originally planned. If you look at the catalogue of our cities, the rhyming images, it’s surprising. We are more similar than I would have thought.
This summer in Edmonton our exposure to forest fire smoke has only come on in the last week or two. But last summer was unbearable. Oppressive, apocalyptic. The story of two cities is going to be the story of the world, and we are geographically at the furthest reaches of our provinces. Wikipedia says of Edmonton, “It is North America's northernmost city with a population over one million.” Of Porto Alegre, Wikipedia says, “The city is the southernmost capital city of a Brazilian state.”
I admit, when I was first told of this project, asked to be a part of it, I thought, well, I certainly did get the better part of this assignment. But seeing Liane’s photographs of Edmonton, helped me see it differently. I think of our limitations from that time — her trying to get the photos she wanted in amidst days of smoke, and me holding my umbrella in the wind and rain those first few days, trying to focus on my subject. I went to the library and the market and church hoping that eventually the storm would let up but certainly feeling the limitations of my short time there.
The one book I took with me was Tim Carpenter’s To Photograph is to Learn to Die. I read it in the mornings over breakfast in the two hotels at which I stayed. In it he says:
“Everything I’ve said so far about the camera — regarding its limitations and possibilities, and how closely those matches the limitations and possibilities of self — should lead us naturally to the conclusion that working with this particular machine is a weirdly and improbably effective way to turn chaotic experience into meaningful response — in other words, to learn to just get along in the world.”
So it’s two years later, two years since I photographed Porto Alegre. And a lot has happened in the world since then. I know you read the news so I won’t re-traumatize you with any of it here. What does it mean to photograph a place, now? Is there a new urgency?
The box and mechanism of the camera seems ever more worthy of philosophical thought in the age of genAIslop. It’s the ending of Carpenter’s book that helps me go on with the camera, thinking with it, through it, seeing by it, contemplating the eye/I. He says: “That’s really all we can ever do: try to figure out how to be of use, to ourselves and others, within our limitations, by continuously choosing well between the worthy and the not.” And then: “This is our ethics. This is the gift of the camera.”
When you photograph anything, you’re a body holding a camera, thinking, feeling, working with your limitations in time and space. You’re an ethical being, looking, seeing. You have a soul. So that’s all in your image whether anyone takes the time to really look at it or not.
