Valdir Cruz

Valdir Cruz, photographer

Valdir Cruz (born 1954) is a Brazilian photographer.

Born in Guarapuava, in the southern state of Paraná, Brazil, Cruz has lived in the United States for more than twenty-five years. He currently divides his time between his studios in New York City and São Paulo. Much of his work in photography has focused on the people, architecture and landscape of Brazil. In 1996 Cruz was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Faces of the Rainforest, a project documenting the life of indigenous people in the Brazilian Rainforest. The Guggenheim Foundation further supported this project with a publication subvention award in 2000.[1]

Career Development

Cruz became interested in photography in the late 1970s through George Stone’s work for National Geographic and began to study photography at the Germain School. He then received technical and aesthetic training from George Tice at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.[2] Cruz developed a solid basis for the comprehension of the entire photographic process, allowing him to approximate the creative methods and visual expression of Edward Steichen, Horst P. Horst, Mapplethorpe, and others.[3] He collaborated with Tice in the authorized production of two important Edward Steichen portfolios, Juxtapositions (1986) and Blue Skies (1987) after which time he devoted his energies exclusive to his own work.[4]

Art Shows

Since 1982 his photographs have been the subject of more than fifty solo exhibitions at venues including the National Arts Club, New York City; the Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; FotoFest International, Houston, TX; the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; and the Centre Culturel de Liège – Les Chiroux, Belgium.

Collections

Cruz’s work has been acquired by private collections and public institutions in the United States and Brazil, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The New York Public Library; The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil. He is represented by Throckmorton Fine Art, Inc., New York City; Bolsa de Arte de Porto Alegre, Porto Alegre; Lourdina Jean Rabieh, São Paulo; and Pequena Galeria 18, Rio de Janeiro.[1]

Reviews and commentary

These photographs [in Faces of the Rainforest] lie halfway between anthropology and art. Halfway between may be the safest place to be today when conflicted feelings and interest in tribal people run so deep that even curiosity about their appearance can be read as exploitation … Though Cruz says he does not want to make the print speak more insistently than the subject, he will not neglect his craft, and these selenium toned black-and-whites have a lovely color and quality.
—Vicki Goldberg[5]

His composition is elegant and imaginative. Nothing escapes from his attentive gaze that elaborates a visual universe based on a map of procedures that reveals pure forms and impertinent abstractions, with strange and pulsating lights. His large-format matrix registers a teeming, nearly pristine nature. One can perceive that Valdir waited patiently for the moment at which the entire improbable natural order of everyday scenes enters into revolution and explodes into the beauty of his photography. He discovers certain visible structures and creates a connection between them; he concentrates a disconcerting power in the image that excites our senses.
—Rubens Fernandes Junior[4]

Promoting ecology through art, Cruz’s compendium references multiple inspirations. Audubon, John Muir, Edward Curtis and Walker Evans are touchstones. Echoes of traditional devotional imagery add an extra dimension of interpretive possibility. Rare trees, withered and gnarled, keep reaching….Themes of singularity and struggle couple with a dynamic handling of form and scale. The restrained palette concentrates the impact, increasing punch and power as Cruz imbues his mute subjects with infinite compassion. Emotion and life cry out in these sculptural images, evocatively antiqued and rarified by being represented in black and white. Cruz captures monumentally the “eyeless thing” staring at us.
—Jeffrey Cyphers Wright[6]

For anyone looking at Valdir Cruz's beautiful, silvery photographs of the remote Indians of the Amazon rain forests, it is difficult to shake the notion that they are images of ghosts populating ghost towns…. For the Brazilian-born Mr. Cruz, whose earlier successes as a portraitist centered on the famous—the likes of Henry Kissinger and Spike Lee—it was this sense of something unknown to the world and rapidly slipping away that lured him from his home and studio on West 14th Street into the rain forest. But in the process, what started as a simple project to photograph rain-forest leaders has become a remarkable artistic and now humanitarian obsession for Mr. Cruz.
—Randy Kennedy[7]

For New York-based photographer Valdir Cruz, the view camera is an instrument for disclosure and interpretation, not simply a means of exposure and recording. Through an increasingly complex series of photographic studies, Cruz demonstrates the commitment of a cultural anthropologist and the patience of an artist. Cruz's work is distinguished by its observant and unaffected pictorialism, clarity of vision, and the high achievement of the printed image itself.
—Edward Leffingwell[8]

Publications

Cruz’s publications include Catedral Basilica de Nossa Senhora de Luz dos Pinhais (New York: Brave Wolf Publishing, 1996); Faces of the Rainforest (New York: Throckmorton Fine Art Exhibition Catalog, 1997, Faces of the Rainforest: the Yanomami (New York: PowerHouse, 2002) published in Brazil as Faces da Floresta: Os Yanomami (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2004); Carnaval, Salvador, Bahia 1995–2005 (New York: Throckmorton Fine Art, 2005); O Caminho das Águas (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2007) with a sponsorship by the Stickel Foundation; Raízes, an environmental study of trees in São Paulo State sponsored by the State of São Paulo and published in March 2010 by Imprensa Oficial of São Paulo; Bonito: Confins do Novo Mundo, images of clear water formations, caves, and landscapes of the Bonito area of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, sponsored by BNP Paribas (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Capivara, 2010); and Guadapuava, a thirty-year photographic essay on the photographer’s hometown in Brazil, which documents a disappearing world in terms of flora and fauna and the lifestyle of the area’s inhabitants themselves (São Paulo: Terra Virgem Edições, 2013).

External links

References

  1. 1 2 "Throckmorton Fine Art".
  2. ↑ Rexer, Lyle (October 20, 2002). "Finding Art, and a Cause, in the Forest". The New York Times.
  3. ↑ Cruz, Valdir (2010). Bonito, Introduction by Rubens Fernandes Junior. Rio de Janeiro: Capivara Editora. p. 106. ISBN 978-8589063357.
  4. 1 2 Cruz, Valdir (1996). Catedral Basilica de Nossa Senhora da Luz dos Pinhais, Introduction by Edward Leffingwell, Afterword by Rubens Fernandes Junior. New York: Brave Wolf Publishing. p. 120. ISBN 978-0965231107.
  5. ↑ Cruz, Valdir (2002). Faces of the Rainforest: The Yanomami, Afterword by Vicki Goldberg. PowerHouse Books. p. 144. ISBN 978-1576871379.
  6. ↑ Wright, Jeffrey Cyphers (Sep–Nov 2011). "Review of Bonito (a solo show at Throckmorton Fine Art, New York)". ArtNexus.
  7. ↑ Kennedy, Randy (January 8, 1998). "At Home With: Valdir Cruz—A Fragile World Through a Lens". The New York Times.
  8. ↑ Leffingwell, Edward (March 1994). "The Exposure of Light and Line". Americas. 46 (2).
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