Styles / Modernist
Fotoclubismo (Escola Paulista)
- Key: the sun, from the camera’s left, at the side, high, hard.
Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down. No reflector or fill: let the shadows fall to black.
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.
Amateur salon photographs from São Paulo's Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante that made the camera club's exhibition print modernist: hard sun, the cast shadows of sills, stairs and roofs drawn as lines, new concrete buildings seen steeply from below or above, and sand, leaves and wiring cropped into pattern. Printed in contrasty black and white as single, titled prints for the club's monthly contests and the international salons; at the club's contested edge, Geraldo de Barros's Fotoformas multiplied, scratched and cut the negative.
How the look is made
- Go out into hard sun and photograph the shadow as much as the thing: let the shadows of window sills, railings, roofs and stairs, and the black lines of poles and cables against a sunlit wall, become the main lines of the picture.
- Find geometry in the new city: point the camera steeply up a façade or down onto a square, and tilt and crop until the building stops being a view and becomes a composition of planes and diagonals.
- Come close to ordinary surfaces such as sand, leaves, corrugated roofs or a wall of meters and wires, and fill the frame with their pattern until line and texture carry the picture.
- Print in strong black and white, with blacks for shade and sky and bright planes in sun; leave behind the soft focus, soft tones, romantic landscapes and classic portraits of the pictorialist salon.
- Make each photograph a finished single print, titled and signed, for the monthly contest and the salons, and keep it photographic: get the form from viewpoint, light, crop and contrast, or at most from darkroom means such as solarisation. At the club's experimental edge, Geraldo de Barros pushed further with multiple exposures, montage and marks scratched or drawn on the negative, which the club's president called 'an undue intervention'; treat these as his contested edge, not the club's norm, which stayed the straight print.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: the sun, from the camera’s left, at the side, high, hard.
- Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.
- No reflector or fill: let the shadows fall to black.
- Shadow edges
- Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows with no fill at all that fall to pure black with no detail, so parts of the subject disappear.
- Shape & form
- Shadows thrown away from what casts them (a figure’s long shadow, railings on a wall) that become shapes of their own in the composition.
How the style is lit
- Hard midday or afternoon sun on façades, stairs and pavements, so sills, stairs, railings and roofs cast long, dark-edged shadows that become lines in the picture, and poles and cables stand black against sunlit walls.
- Sun skimming across sand, plaster, leaves or corrugated roofs, turning a surface into an all-over pattern of light and dark.
- A bright, hazy sky behind towers, chimneys or a building seen from below, read as a flat pale or darkly printed ground.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- Then
- 40–50 mm · f/8–f/16 · 1/500–1/100 s on full frame, inferred from the gear and the look. Leicas (German Lorca owned seven) and Rolleiflex twin-lens reflexes (de Barros's of 1939, 6 × 6 cm negatives), about 40–50 mm equivalent. The hard sun suggests f/8–f/16 at 1/100–1/500 s; these exposure figures are inferred, as none was found in club records.
- Focal length
- Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
- Angle
- Looking up: the subject towers. Looking down on the subject.
- Distance
- Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame.
- Balance
- Tilted lines and oblique movement drive the picture.
- Crop & fill
- Detail runs to every edge with no single centre. The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.
- Depth
- Depth collapsed into pattern and flat shapes.
Direct
Nobody is directed. If people appear, keep them small and unaware inside the geometry: two children sitting on a sunlit doorstep, or a few walkers crossing a square seen from above, spaced apart and trailing long shadows. Faces barely read and no one looks at the lens. Portraits are rare, cropped tight and often solarised.
- Body position
- Caught or posed in mid-step, one foot lifted, clothes swinging.
- Without a pose
- No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).
- The moment
- People photographed as they are, unaware or unconcerned.
Style the set
Nothing is styled: façades, stairs, roofs, sand, leaves and wiring are taken as they are, and the few people wear their own everyday clothes. No studio, backdrop, costume or props; at the experimental edge, a chair or a sheet of textured glass becomes raw material for multiple exposures.
- How much is styled
- Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Finish
- Monochrome
- A black-and-white scale pushed towards pure black and pure white, with few middle greys. Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between.
- Post-production
- Nothing changed beyond exposure and development.
- Shown as
- Each picture stands on its own.
Stay away from soft focus & diffusion, gum & pigment processes, soft monochrome, formal posed portrait, nostalgic, studio props, costume & dressing-up and studio backdrop.
Before you shoot it
These are signed works by named amateur photographers whose estates still hold the copyright (MoMA credits the Thomaz Farkas, Gaspar Gasparian, Gertrudes Altschul and Marcel Giró estates), and the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante is still active in São Paulo.
Where to see it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
In copyright, so linked
- Apartments (Apartamentos) , German Lorca, 1950–51. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- Ministry of Education (Ministério da Educação) [Rio de Janeiro] , Thomaz Farkas, c. 1945. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- Divergent (Divergente) , Gaspar Gasparian, 1949. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- Hommage à Simeao Leal from the series Fotoforma, Rio de Janeiro , Geraldo de Barros, 1950, printed 1977. The Art Institute of Chicago.
With other styles
Pairs with New Vision. New Vision supplied the steep views, diagonals and photograms; borrow its tilted bird's-eye and worm's-eye angles, then keep the Paulista habit of finishing each frame as a single, carefully printed salon picture in hard sun.
The opposite: Pictorialism. The club began in pictorialist salons and defined itself against them; swap the soft focus, misty contre-jour and brushed print for crisp shadows and geometry to see exactly what the Paulistas rejected.
Pairs with Straight photography. Straight photography shares the sharp, unmanipulated print and close studies of surfaces; add its full tonal range and deep focus when a Paulista texture study should read as a thing rather than an abstraction.
The opposite: New Objectivity photography. New Objectivity looks at buildings and objects level, frontal and evenly lit; use it as the foil when you want calm inventory, and return to the Paulista tilt and cast shadow when you want the city to become pattern.
Sources
- MoMA press release, Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 (29 September 2020, updated 1 February 2021): https://press.moma.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MoMA_Fotoclubismo-Press-Release_FINAL_Updated-2.1.21.pdf (on view 8 May to 26 September 2021; organised by Sarah Meister with Dana Ostrander; over 60 photographs; members were amateurs; Geraldo de Barros's Fotoforma, Thomaz Farkas's Ministry of Education and Health, Rio (c. 1945), Gertrudes Altschul's Filigree; monthly Concursos Internos, annual salon and Boletim; contacts with Otto Steinert's Subjective photographers, Groupe des XV, La Ventana and Carpeta de los Diez)
- MoMA exhibition page: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5245 (first museum exhibition of the FCCB outside Brazil; 'inventive experiments to distillations from everyday life'; attentiveness to abstraction)
- Sarah Meister, 'The Ambition and Originality of Fotoclubismo's Amateur Photographers', MoMA Magazine, 7 May 2021: https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/557 (Boletim from 1946; weekend excursions; de Barros's MASP show in January 1951 with multiple exposures and montage; German Lorca, White Roofs, 1951, contrast of corrugated roof and shadows; José Yalenti, Angles, 1951; Altschul joined in 1952 and photographed leaves; prints with salon labels on the verso)
- Heloisa Espada, 'The Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante's Reception of Geraldo de Barros's 1951 Fotoforma Exhibition', post (MoMA), 1 June 2021: https://post.moma.org/the-foto-cine-clube-bandeirantes-reception-of-geraldo-de-barross-1951-fotoforma-exhibition/ (MASP, 2–18 January 1951; multiple exposures of a single negative, drypoint and india ink on the negative, prints cut into irregular formats; images made with small fragments of negatives mounted on glass plates, and montage; Salvatore, the club's president and editor of the Boletim, called it 'an undue intervention' and 'artificial and un-photographic'; the Boletim never published his printed and cutout photographs; de Barros joined in May 1949; he worked 'on 2 3/8 by 2 3/8-inch negatives', that is 6 x 6 cm roll film)
- Beatriz Jaguaribe, 'The Modernist Gaze and the City', post (MoMA), 13 May 2021: https://post.moma.org/the-modernist-gaze-and-the-city-notes-on-photography-and-urban-repertoires-in-sao-paulo-and-rio-de-janeiro-in-the-1940s-and-50s/ (Farkas's vertical shot of the Gustavo Capanema Palace, c. 1945, its façade shadowed by an electric pole, the composition abstracted; photomontage, photograms and solarisations)
- Vanessa Sobrino Lenzini, 'As noções de moderno na fotografia do Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante', II Encontro de História da Arte, IFCH/Unicamp, 2006: https://www.ifch.unicamp.br/eha/atas/2006/LENZINI,%20Vanessa%20Sobrino%20-%20IIEHA.pdf (Costa and Rodrigues's phases: pioneers Farkas, de Barros, Yalenti, Lorca; Escola Paulista: Salvatore, Giró, Yoshida, Altschul, Manarini, Gasparian, Ivo Ferreira da Silva, João Bizarro Nave Filho; change at the VII Salão, 1948; Boletim articles from 1948 urging high contrast, huge shadows and urban everyday subjects against soft tones, romantic landscapes and classic portraits; manual intervention criticised as pictorialist; a change of discourse 'a favor de uma fotografia direta e subjetiva', subjectivity expressed through the strictly photographic process rather than pictorial interventions)
- Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foto_Cine_Clube_Bandeirante (founded 28 April 1939; Foto Clube Bandeirante until 1945; first salon, the Salão Paulista de Arte Fotográfica, 3 October 1942, retitled Salão Internacional de Arte Fotográfica as its reach became global by its fifth year; Boletim from May 1946, over 140 issues to 1964; FIAP 1950; Sala de Fotografia at the second São Paulo Bienal, 1953; Farkas's Estudos fotográficos at MAM São Paulo, July 1949)
- Paula V. Kupfer, 'The Foto Cine Clube', Aperture, 28 March 2016: https://aperture.org/blog/foto-cine-clube/ (MASP exhibition Do Arquivo à Rede, 2015–2016; early pictorialist work 'morphed into a sharper look at geometry, shadow, and light'; stamps and labels on the backs of the prints)
- 'Aufbruch in Brasilien. Die Geschichte einer transatlantischen Moderne', Leica Camera blog, 11 February 2026, with the Frankfurt Leica gallerist Alina Hofmann: https://leica-camera.com/de-DE/blog/aufbruch-brasilien (German Lorca owned seven Leica cameras with lenses and a 1952 portrait of him was used in a Leica advertisement; Yalenti co-founded the club in 1939 with Benedito Duarte and Eduardo Salvatore)
- Art Institute of Chicago, Geraldo de Barros, Untitled (Abstract), 1951: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/241333 (he used multiple exposures, drew and etched on negatives and reassembled fragments of negatives)
- MoMA collection records: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/177889 (Farkas), https://www.moma.org/collection/works/203525 (Lorca), https://www.moma.org/collection/works/189482 (Gasparian), https://www.moma.org/collection/works/200023 (Giró), https://www.moma.org/collection/works/199722 (Altschul), https://www.moma.org/collection/works/201385 (Yalenti), https://www.moma.org/collection/works/200016 (Altschul, Untitled, c. 1955, 28.9 × 28.9 cm, a square print); dimensions checked in MoMA's open collection dataset, https://github.com/MuseumofModernArt/collection; the Lorca page still reads '© German Lorca' (October 2026)
- Sicardi Ayers Bacino, Geraldo de Barros biography: https://sicardi.com/artists/geraldo-de-barros (his first camera was built from a kit; he bought a 1939 Rolleiflex and in 1949 joined the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante)
- Ela Bittencourt, 'Brazil's Fotoclubistas in Focus', The New York Review of Books, 11 June 2021: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2021/06/11/brazils-fotoclubistas-in-focus/ ('the São Paulo School (Escola Paulista), as the club's Modernist vanguard eventually came to be called'; 'rhythmic geometric forms, dramatic camera angles, and high contrasts'; 'Abstraction is synonymous with the work of Geraldo de Barros, one of the club's most radical experimenters'; 'the plunging street views' of Gasparian's Divergent)
- 'Aufbruch in Brasilien. Die Geschichte einer transatlantischen Moderne', Leica Camera blog, 11 February 2026: https://leica-camera.com/de-DE/blog/aufbruch-brasilien (German Lorca owned seven Leica cameras with lenses; a 1952 portrait of him was used in a Leica advertisement)
- Geraldo de Barros biography, Sicardi Ayers Bacino: https://sicardi.com/artists/geraldo-de-barros (his first camera was built from a kit; he bought a 1939 Rolleiflex and joined the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante in 1949)
- Heloisa Espada, 'The Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante's Reception of Geraldo de Barros's 1951 Fotoforma Exhibition', post (MoMA), 1 June 2021: https://post.moma.org/the-foto-cine-clube-bandeirantes-reception-of-geraldo-de-barross-1951-fotoforma-exhibition/ (for a Fotoforma of c. 1950 de Barros 'turned and slightly displaced his Rolleiflex camera with each shot'; he drew with drypoint and india ink 'on 2 3/8 by 2 3/8-inch negatives' for A Menina do Sapato, c. 1949)
- Rolliflex camera, Science Museum Group Collection (Kodak Collection): https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8206661 (twin-lens reflex for 120 roll film 2¼ × 2¼ in.; taking lens Zeiss Tessar 7.5 cm f/3.5–22; shutter 1 to 1/300 s, B and T)