"To photograph and manipulate images is to think about the depth of human relationships". It is embraced by this phrase that the photographer Maria Cecilia de São Thiago builds a universe from family records made more than two decades before she was born. Stereoscopic photographs of her siblings taken by her father between 1929 and 1944 are the basis of this fabulous and imaginary timeline that connects her with the childhood of her four older brothers. Using the most advanced digital manipulation and treatment programs, Maria Cecilia transforms the images taken over 70 years ago into poetic visual diaries of an experience she herself would have liked to have, thus promoting self-cure through photography and reducing homesickness that he feels of a time he did not live.
Paulo Marcos de Mendonça Lima
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A bigger explanation about my work:
- What does the title of your book mean in English?
"Eu Sei Sim Onde ela Mora” means Yes, I know where she lives. Or something like: I do know where she lives [en français: Oui, Je sais où elle habite.] This is the first sentence of a song written and composed by my father, where SHE is a reference to happiness. Yes I know where happiness lives.
"I do know where she lives
I speak of happiness
she lives in the country
don't get along in the city."
The name of the song is "Sítio São João” [Farm Saint John] concerning the small farm he owned, and where my older brothers and later my little brother and I spent many weekends and winter holidays in our childhoods and throughout life. Many of the photographs for this book were taken there.
This work, since its creation in 2016, has been fragmented in several parts. “I know where she lives” is a book with collages, dedicated to my four older brothers.
https://px3.fr/interviews/maria-cecilia-de-sao-thiago/
This is also part and study for the “Unforgettable” Photobook, I will release soon.
As the original photos are originally stereoscopic, I am thinking for a future presentation/exhibition, in the possibility of showing them not only printed and framed, but also visible in the current Virtual Reality glasses that enable 3D viewing.
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- What was the starting point?
Mario de São Thiago my father, was born in 1904.
He was married twice. In the first marriage, he had 4 boys. Aristides 1929, João Baptista 1930-2012, Mario 1932 and Lelio 1933-2021. Then he became widower for 9 and a half years, and at 51 he married Cecilia Lourdes, my mother. From this union, I was born in 1957 and my younger brother Fabio, in 1962.
My father was a dentist but he was very fond of photographing developing and enlarging his own photos at home. As an enthusiastic photographer, he was very interested in technology and cameras. Between 1929 and 1944 he made a long series of stereoscopic photographs and I have his glass negatives since his death in 1977.
I must have been about five when he let me into the "darkroom" with him to move the developer tray to see the first images appearing like magic on paper. This marked my life a lot, but I wasn’t able to understand how much, for a long period of time.
At the same time, when I was at this age and went to sleep, he used to told me “little stories” before falling asleep. It was always magical moments of passages in his life that were described to me in the darkness of my room and made my imagination travel to a time that was not mine. A time that I wanted to belong. That's how the feelings got mixed up, creating a longing in me for a time I didn't live.
Going back in time, imagining things from other times, looking at old photo albums, transported me to a new world. And a long time ago I discovered that this was a way to calm the longing that I felt, now not only of a time that I did not live, but of that father who taught me so many things and died when I was 19 and still needed him so much.
As Natalie Cole, making use of technology, releases the album “Unforgettable With Love“ using a new technique that allowed her to re-record duets from old musical records with her deceased father. I take up the glass negatives of stereoscopic photographs of my older brothers, taken by my father between 1929 and 1944, and reinterpret these images, creating a coming and going between times and spaces in order to create a possibility of materialization the longing I feel of a time I haven't lived.
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- Please could you describe your creative process, explaining how you appropriated the glass negatives of your father's stereoscopic photographs from 1933 to create new works?
When I started to rework the photographs taken by my father, re-colouring the white & black images, and creating a surreal and dreamlike environment for each one, I had no idea how much this work would be to alleviate the deep pain felt since 1977 when he died. Even though I took this work to the postgraduate school, it was recently talking with an English friend in a group of studies on photography about the healing process, that I realised the importance of creating these and other images.
My creative process for all the projects I get involved in is always the same. I create several images at the same time in an intense and unrestrained hypnotic process, stimulated by a single song that I listen to repeatedly without pause, which takes me like a mantra to places in my subconscious where emotions were felt or imagined.
These emotions that come through the music are revived, so I can resume them in the form of images.
It is as if I create a film inside me. A film that stimulates my conscious mind and opens the doors of perception to enhance my imagination in a unique creative process.
With the advent of the iPhone and iPad, I found myself able to work on the photographs in a new way, but similar to that I used in college, when I already intervened in the pictures by painting and doodling on the enlarged photograph with nankin and watercolour ink.. -> http://www.klimtt.com/1977 .
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- Did your father take the original images in São Paulo? If not, where? What historical importance does this represent to you?
Most of the original images were taken in São Paulo, in the same house where I was born 24 years later. Other images were taken in the coastal cities of Santos and Praia Grande and many also at the São João Farm mentioned above, which was in the city of Suzano, today swallowed by gentrification and part of a large pulp and paper factory.
I believe that the more I know about all my photograph albums, the better I know about my own history. And I see in each image part of the stories told by my father to me.
There are things that go beyond photography, that live in the invisible of the image, in the facts that led someone on a given day to photograph.
And when I started this project I was sure that the reconstructed memory made everything fit together in a new and intriguing way
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- Some of the images appear revisited and manipulated, while others seem collaged. Could you elaborate on the different processes?
This work, since its creation in 2015, has been fragmented in several parts. “I know where she lives” is a book with collages, dedicated to my four older brothers. This is also part and study for the “Unforgettable” Photobook, I will release soon.
To photograph and manipulate images is to think about the depth of human relationships.
I realized that photography has become a healing process for me over the years. But it was through this work that I was able to caress my pain, better formulate and accept the core of my sadness, realizing that this was a turning point for me. As a “search for lost time”, I try to make the absent present, showing the invisibility of images between chiaroscuro, light and shadow, positive and negative, in this attempt to materialize the longing for a time that I have not lived.
As I gradually create or "externalize" my images on my mobile devices, I bring to light certain elements of my unconscious that were previously in the shadow. The transformation occurs in the psychological state. Thus, although an image is not a reflection of the mirror, the images I create can and do reflect elements of the psyche, revealing them in a new symbolic way. I think this is particularly true when I create or "recreate" portraits.
Collages are created from many layers. Layers refer to the bark of trees or those of sedimentary rocks and that demonstrate the passage of time and the merging between times and spaces.
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- Why were you interested in revisiting these historical negatives and creating a new, illusionistic universe?
When I decided to start editing my father's glass negatives on 28 12 2015, my intention was to provoke a trip in time and in the memory of my brothers, Aristides - Tide 92 years old today, [João Baptista - Batita had passed away in 2012] Mario 89 and Lelio [ who passed away in 2021].
At those days, I could see that in a not too distant future I would be without them around.
Like everything, over time, the work has been changing and more intensely, also changing me. And from the simple trajectory of the images in these almost 100 years in which they were made, the work today has a greater scope than that of technology, the history of photography, or of the memories that we keep and carry with us, but a depth of self-knowledge and the question of Healing through Art that it involves.
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- What narrative and merging of time did you want to create in your book?
“Without photography, a moment would be lost forever, as if it never existed,” said legendary photographer Richard Avedon.
My work tries to show how the picture extends beyond its own limits and often a subjective account of a story about the effects of human interaction. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is made to cast the realms of our imagination.
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- To what extent did making this project feel cathartic to you? Besides the intellectual exploration, was the project an emotional way to come to terms with the loss of your father?
As Susanne Langer says, "the non-discursive form in art articulates knowledge that cannot be processed discursively because it concerns experiences that are not formally liable to discursive projection".
In other words, my work is a symbolic representation of something and, in this preconscious process, it cannot yet be recognised or treated through discourse. The images are able to exemplify very precisely the idea that photography is also a construction of the past; without the need of the discursive element, for example.
Access to the past via photography and memory, since, to some extent, depends on a narrative construction, always brings with it an incorporating dimension of fiction and surrealism.
Furthermore, I want to believe that this work has a very strong universality, as family albums have always been very common in our culture. No matter who the images belong to, the story of all of us has always been similar.
On the other hand, I want to talk about family memories with a focus on the use of technology, because I also saw in my father's images the same enthusiasm in use the most advanced methods of creation of his time.
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Other questions
- What is your motivation as a photographer?
Creating for me is always the best way to look inside and thus decipher the messages that my alter ego and my unconscious are trying to convey to me.
The creation for me needs to be accompanied by a single song playing over and over and over in a kind of hypnotic mantra, which has the incredible ability to take from me what I didn't know existed.
That is the healing power that I know art have. When, after a while, I turn my look to what was created, I perceive the reflection in the images of my momentary nature, and I understand myself better.
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- What relationship do you see between your work as a graphic designer and your personal projects as a photographer? How does your work as a graphic designer influence your approach to your photographic projects (such as post-production techniques etc)?
I believe that an artist usually has a line of work, what we call artistic identity, that is, a set of exclusive characteristics that set him apart from others, making him unique in his performance.
As for the graphic designer, which is my case, doesn't have a unique design like the artist. He shapes himself with each job, doing what others want him to translate.
And it is from this mixture between art-making and creation for the other as a designer that I recognise my work. Always with the influence and inspiration in the lines, layout and gestures of the drawings from Klimt, Schiele and Hundertwasser.
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- When were you born in São Paulo?
I was born in October 1957. But I will need to tell you a little about my father and my brothers so that the viewer understands where these photos come from, since the age difference in my family is unusually large. I like to tell a passage from my father's life that clearly illustrates the situation.
Mário de São Thiago, my father, was born in 1904 and in 1934 he went with his wife to the wedding of a friend, leaving his 4 young children at home. A 5-year-old girl entered the front of the bride. Cecilia Lourdes, my mother.
Life goes round and round! When Mário, on that day, would think that his wife Luciola, would die so young [with 38] , and nine and a half years later, he would remarry Cecilia, the maid of honor of that marriage, who was the same age as Aristides, his eldest son?
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- What have you been working on during the Covid-19 pandemic?
I always did an intervention in photography, drawing on the enlarged image. And now, during the pandemic, it was no different. I recreated some works painted in nankin and watercolour after they were printed. But above all, I created several projects for photography festivals in Brazil, which should be launched virtually, due to pandemic times.
My collages and digital manipulations clearly show the presence of digital technology in the way I now reconstruct the past and think about the present, so the digital medium introduces a very interesting and currently important conceptual element to my work. I cannot forget that my access to the past is nowadays determined by a current worldview in which technology is very present.
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- What projects would you like to work on in the future?
I have been working on several projects at the same time.
I have in my drawer a project of another photobook on self-portrait and identity, which I intend to put into practice in a near future. But despite my intrinsic connection with digital media, I am creating a more handmade photo project, reinvigorating an analogue laboratory that I had here at home, in which I draw with the brush embedded in the developer on the paper exposed to light.
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International Cataloging Data in Publication
(CIP) (Câmara Brasileira do Livro, SP, Brazil);
São Thiago, Maria Cecilia de;
Unforgettable / Maria Cecilia de São Thiago;
Rio de Janeiro: Ateliê Oriente, 2021.
1. photographs 2. photographs - portraits 3. brothers I. title; 21-66651 / CDD-779.9.
indexes for systematic catalog: 1. photographs 779.9; Cibele Maria Dias, Librarian, CRB-8/9427.
ISBN 978-65-995062-0-8
BRASIL fashion NEWS
https://www.brasilfashionnews.com.br/maria-cecilia-de-sao-thiago-lanca-o-fotolivro-unforgettable/
Resumo Fotográfico
http://www.resumofotografico.com/2021/06/maria-cecilia-de-sao-thiago-lanca-o-fotolivro-unforgettable.html