Rio, from Pedra da Gávea to Joatinga
Share
Rio is photographed more than almost any city on earth. That is the problem with photographing Rio. Every obvious frame has been made, printed, and sold a hundred thousand times, and a print that looks like a postcard belongs on a postcard.
Six prints here are from the city. Each one is an attempt to find the angle the postcards skipped.
The statue, twice
There are two Cristo prints and they are deliberately different problems. Cristo Redentor is the statue as subject. Cristo Sobre a Baía is the statue as a small thing in a very large bay — the mountain, the water and the weather doing most of the work, the figure providing scale.
The second is the one I would hang. The first is the one people recognise.
The rock
Pedra da Gávea from the neighbouring peak and from the city below are the same monolith and almost unrelated images. From across the ridge it is a green mountain with a flat stone head, with Rio laid out small beside it. From below it is a wall, and the sense of it is entirely different — you get the weight, which distance takes away.
If you only take one, take the one that matches the room. The aerial is calm and graphic. The view from beneath is not calm at all.
The beach nobody photographs
Praia da Joatinga is a small beach that disappears at high tide and is reached by a path most visitors never find. It photographs like a secret because it more or less is one, and it is the print in this group that looks least like Rio.
The city itself
A Vida no Morro is the only one of the six that is about people rather than landscape. Rio is not only its coastline, and a set of prints that pretends otherwise is selling a brochure. It is the hardest image here to place in a room and the one I would least want to leave out.
A note on what is missing
There is no Sugarloaf print and no Copacabana print. Not an oversight. I have not yet made either in a way that adds anything to the versions that already exist, and until that changes they stay off the site. Twenty-six Brazil prints rather than thirty is the right trade.