Zeca Fernandes · Gallerist and curator
The gaze that translates the simplicity of life is the same one that heals our anguish, our fears and our secrets. Mysteries of a world where the capture of reality never goes unnoticed. And this is already more than twenty years on the road revealing talent, sensibility and a generosity that overflows the seas of the backlands.
Nature needs to reinvent itself. Light, often in silence, asks leave to take hold of this photographer’s work. Satisfaction and recognition are the fruit of evolution, of willingness and of the discipline of a more than sharpened gaze — a human gaze.
Gabriela Daltro · Artistic production
I imagine year one. It is 2005 and I recognise a Luciana, a doctor, camera in hand. Looking had been part of her life long before that.
Over the years she has crossed cities, deserts and silences. To some she always returns. The Bahian backlands and the northern lights in Norway enchant her with equal force. I saw the time of waiting, the repetition of the gesture, the emotion at what she saw.
Today we are here to look at what was made, to follow the course of a time. VINTE E UM is about continuity. About a gaze that has not lost its capacity to transform.
Fabio Gatti
Photography was historically a masculinist technology — which is why women such as Anna Atkins, Julia Margaret Cameron and many others were obliterated for decades from the dominant narratives of the technical image.
It is against that background that the presence, the practice and the history of a Black, Northeastern, doctor and travelling photographer like Lu Brito matter, and matter greatly. Pushing past the limits socially imposed on her body, her gender, her race and the geopolitics of her territory, she became both a respected ophthalmologist and a photographer recognised at home and abroad.
Ricardo Sena
It is a privilege to have followed and named Luciana Brito’s first exhibition, in 2015 — that is how Ludosmundos was born. A name for the moment when looking becomes geography.
Lu does not photograph places. She deciphers them. From the warm light of the Bahian backlands to the cutting ice of Patagonia, from the volcano in Chile to the aridity of the Atacama, she moves between continents without losing her axis. What we see is relation, time spent, dust on the shoe.
Uiler Costa-Santos · An unorganised peace
When I come close to Luciana Brito’s work, what I recognise first is the way she relates to the world. A way of crossing it that has less of choice than of condition. Photographing stopped being, for her, the reason for the trip. It became the means by which the trip is bearable.
In the clinic she corrects eyes, reorganises focus, restores what was being lost. In photography she does the opposite: she refuses stabilised vision and photographs what is about to stop existing.
Inside every human eye there is a region incapable of producing an image. A blind spot. Every time we see, we see with a gap. The difference is that we normally do not know it. As an ophthalmologist, she knows. As a photographer, she makes the gap the place of the image.
“I don’t search. I am seized,” she says. What moves her is not the beauty of the landscape: it is the aridity, the lack, the emptiness. She comes back from those journeys knowing she is minute. That unimportance sets her free.
