The Retrospectiva Carlos Moreira – Wrong so Well occupies three floors in the Porto Seguro Cultural space, in a torrential caught from the work of the artist who was also a teacher of photography. As such, he attended the School of Communication and Arta at the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP) from 1971 to 1974 and, again, in 1979 to 1990.
In 1990 he created the school of photography M2 Studio, along with Regina Martins who today integrates the team of curator of the exhibition.
The title, Wrong so Well, comes from an annotation made by the artist among his digital photos: “I like when you do it right. But I like much more when you do it wrong so well “.
Moreira is dedicated to authorial photography, street photography, travel photography. His photos are taken with great care, sensitivity and pleasure.
The building of Porto Seguro in the neighborhood of Campos Eliseos, which houses the exposition, has already become one of the important centers of art in São Paulo and the show of Carlos Moreira is the most recent of the 16 exhibitions presented there, series that began with Grandes Mestres –Leonardo, Michelangelo and Rafael, who inaugurated the space at the beginning of 2016.
There are about 400 photos in this retrospective, chosen by the curators Fábio Furtado, Regina Martins and Rodrigo Villela – who is executive and artistic director of Espaço Cultural Porto Seguro –, in a curatorial work that began in January and plunged into the archives of more than 50 years of the photographer’s work.
For the curators the “exhibition was born in front of some considerable challenges yet wonderful… More than 150,000 colorful frames were inventoried–unpublished images that can now be seen by the public for the first time. The black–and–white part, although already catalogued and previously organized, represents another 80.000 frames, approximately. If we add to that its digital production, since the beginning of the years 2000 to date, the volume at least doubles. Not to mention the delightful risk of having a new and extraordinary sequence of images made by Carlos every day, during the process. “.
Born in São Paulo in 1936, Carlos Moreira began photographing at the beginning of the sixties when he enchanted himself with Henry Cartier–Bresson and whose influence he later turned away. Currently the photographer recognizes “a certain ‘ hardness ‘ in Cartier–Bresson that bothers me today, but it was important in my photographic education.”
Moreira graduated from Mackenzie University in Economics and opted for photography in 1964, abandoning the economy.
Known for its analogical photos in black and white, produced in cities where he went, on the walls of Espaço Cultural Porto Seguro are also exposed 250 unpublished photos of his color and digital phases. Divided into cores, the exhibition gathers from the photos from the beginning of the career to recent digital images. Carlos Moreira has exhibited in Paris (1983), Washington (1986) and New York (1988). His photos are in collections like the Pompidou.
Also interesting are their technical choices, at this time where the dizzying technological transition that has been blowing us for decades, in addition to the said progress, provokes also discussions where neither icons are spared. Recently Sebastião Salgado provoked buzz on social networks by shooting that, for him the “images from celular phones are not photography”.
The work of Carlos Moreira comes to light through cameras and techniques chosen in a healthy eclectic manner.
He shoots with Leicas, analogical and digital, with the very practical Canon Powershot and also with the even fewer complex celular phones. His photos are printed in black and white, in color and on various media that include even Cicero and Moleskine notebooks. And in this is important the phrase included in the expography of the show:
“… It is clear that for him the heart of photography is not in the device itself, but in what he provides to the artist in his relationship with the world.
