Heart of Darkness text by Robert Goethals, photography by Miguel Rio Branco

Copyright, Miguel Rio Branco, Magnum Photos

Rio Branco’s images grab you by the throat, smack you in the face, and send the blood roaring in your ears. You’re instantaneously embroiled in a street scene whose beginning you’ve missed, whose ending you’ll never know, whose protagonists look at you with sullen eyes, hands outstretched, the sheen of

sweat glistening across their scarred bodies. It’s not ethereal. It’s all feverishly real.

Rio Branco’s fierce photographs of boxers, shot at the Academia Santa Rosa Boxing Club in Rio de Janeiro in the 90s, incarnate his renegade and baroque sensibility. The underground gym was named after Isabel Flores de Oliva, a.k.a. Santa Rosa, famous for having disfigured her beautiful face with pepper and lye, finding repose on beds of shards of glass, and regularly sporting a spiked metal crown.

Copyright, Miguel Rio Branco, Magnum Photos

You see the same masochistically sublime devotion reflected in the boxers inhabiting her club. A one-armed pugilist strikes out at you. Another vanishes in a bloody time-blurred smear skipping rope. A longhaired fighter silently

stares skyward, the earthly image of the Suffering Redeemer, invoking some invisible presence. Azure blues, tourmaline greens, the color of flesh all vie for you attention. A supreme colorist, Rio Branco employs hues in dramatic fashion, but it’s never the whole spectrum. The images themselves often feel monochromatic. Lush and vibrant, these muted streaks of color can become characters in themselves, struggling in the crepuscular light against dense slabs of darkness.

Copyright, Miguel Rio Branco, Magnum Photos

Like the Santa Rosa boxers, the prostitutes inhabiting the shadowland of Salvador’s Maciel neighborhood, reveal their ravished bodies to Rio Branco’s consecrated gaze, too. Lying on her shanty floor, a woman luxuriates in her nakedness, the chiaroscuro of opulent browns in skin and wood luring you to the edge of thought.

Rio Branco has long been compared to Caravaggio, both in terms of color as well as content. Just as Caravaggio’s whores, gypsies, and dead virgins blasted European painting out of the morass of Mannerism and the talon grip of the Sacre Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, Rio Branco’s photonic vision obliterates the heavily patrolled borderline separating photojournalism’s scruffy hood from Art Land. The son of a Spanish diplomat, Rio Branco has more in common with Goya, another artist who trod the path of social commentary, capturing those buried alive in poverty or gunned down by faceless oppressors. Both artists share a predilection for terrifying, titillating, and phantasmagorical depiction.

Miguel Rio Branco, Santa Rosa Kid, JGS

For Rio Branco, fixing your gaze on savage truths is as much an ethical as a creative imperative. As he navigates the serpentine pathways of favelas and urban junglelands, the artist takes risks most of us would be unwilling to accept. But it’s the acceptance of these risks, the necromantic strength he pulls from his heart, which makes Rio Branco’s images such mesmerizing gifts. People say to live fully, you must read widely, since books take you to places you’ve never seen. Contemplating Miguel Rio Branco’s incandescent images, bookish experiences feel second-hand.

Copyright, Miguel Rio Branco, Magnum Photos

~ Robert Goethals, October 2010