Miguel Rio Branco. Maldicidade [Hardcover]

InMaldicidade, the city never sleeps. By dawn or dusk, in New York, Havana, Salvador da Bahia, or Tokyo, it is an environment fraught with yearning, aching with solitude, and fretful with fortunes never made. Thissearing urban portraitfrom visual artistMiguel Rio Brancodraws upon his itinerant early years as the son of diplomats to reveal thecommon threads of struggle and loneliness in metropolisesaround the world.

The images are impeccably captured, but the pictures are not always pretty.Rio Branco is not interested in documenting historic city landmarks, an impressive skyline, or the aspirational dreams that soar up towards it. Instead, he focuses his camera on the citys refuse and marginson that which it has thrown away and on those it has cast aside and disappointed. In stark frames or soft impressions, it isstreet sleepers, beggars, prostitutes, stray dogs, smashed cars, and shattered glassthat characterize his urban impressions.

While subtle details reveal the specificity of place, it isthe commonality of urban experience at the heart of Rio Brancos project. Light on local context or explanatory narrative, the images are instead meticulously arranged into one redolent sequence of a universal city. Working as if in the cutting studio, Rio Branco excels in the rhythm and succession of pictures, craftingevocative patterns of motif(decrepit buildings, lone figures, smashed-up cars);color(rich reds, dusty pinks, stark whites and blues); andform(an anguished street sleeper beside an ecstatic statue of a saint). Throughout, occasional pictures of women are proffered as sensual, hopeful reprieve, interspersing the grit and the grime in commanding portraits or up-close, supple nudes.

At once incisive in its message and lyrical in its arrangement,MaldicidadefocuselcF