The beauty of discomfort in the photography of Miguel Rio Branco

Miguel was born in 1946, in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, son of the Brazilian diplomat Helio de Almeida, which led to a childhood marked by constant geographical displacements. He grew up between countries such as Switzerland, Portugal, Germany, and the United States, developing a cosmopolitan perspective from an early age — but also a sense of not belonging. This cultural transit nurtured a sensitivity to limits, to the "in-between places," and later would reverberate in the way he treated the human condition in his work.

“In the early 1970s, my situation was that of a beginner in photography… [but] I could see the cities from the more marginal side of society. And, living near Bowery, I couldn't understand how a rich country could coexist with such degraded people.”

He studied painting and photography in the United States (at School of Industrial Arts in New York and at the Institute of Photography of New York) and also attended schools in Paris. His hybrid training between visual languages and cinema influenced his aesthetic, which is charged with fragmented narratives, violent chromaticism, and strong emotional weight.

“From the beginning, I always relied on intersection. Painting meeting photography. Drawing meeting collage. Photography meeting cinema. Music meeting poetry. Poetry meeting editing. All these encounters are part of the many crossovers in the search for an understanding and expression of myself in relation to the world.”

He began his professional career as a filmmaker and photographer in the early 1970s. In 1978, he became a correspondent for the Magnum Photos agency, although he never officially joined the agency — which already indicated his refusal to bind himself to fixed models, including traditional photojournalism.

“In recent years, I have developed work that begins from photojournalism or documentary photography. I start with ideas that often lie in the social field, but then develop poetic images [...] If I succeed, the work transcends the limits of photojournalism. It is an interpretative work, in which my unconscious remains free while I photograph.”

His early work was more documentary, focused on recording urban scenes, social conditions, and violence — but soon he distanced himself from direct realism and adopted a more subjective, allegorical, sometimes pictorial approach. An important turning point was his experience in Salvador (Bahia), in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There, he immersed himself in marginalized communities and began to develop a very personal language: visceral, chromatic, tactile, and sensory.

This period was a watershed in his artistic trajectory. More than just a geographical cut, this time consolidated the aesthetic and existential turn of the artist — and it was there that he found his most visceral, densest, and most symbolic universe.

Settled in the then-declining neighborhood of Pelourinho, Rio Branco immersed intensely in the urban life of the city, especially in the more marginalized and invisible spaces: tenements, brothels, fight houses, deteriorated alleys.

It is in Salvador that his most emblematic work was born, the book and exhibition "Maldicidade," although it was only published many years later, in 2014. The word — a fusion of “curse” and “city” — already announces the type of poetics that defines this cycle: a photography laden with beauty, cruelty, and mysticism.

During this period, he distanced himself once and for all from black and white photography and deepened his obsession with the symbolic use of color. Deep reds, ochres, bluish shadows. Salvador appears as a living organism, where colonial baroque mixes with the black presence, sensuality, religiosity, and exclusion.

One of the most photographed spaces by him in the city was a boxing gym in a grimy basement. The bodies of the fighters, wounded and sweaty, become objects of survival, of tension between power and exhaustion — central themes in his work. The images of this environment appear in books such as Silent Book (1997) and Pele do Tempo (2004).

Before the neighborhood's revitalization by the government in the 1990s, Pelourinho was seen as a collapsing space, full of racial, social, and architectural tension. For Miguel Rio Branco, however, it was there that the hidden truth of Brazil pulsed: a place where the colonial past, present violence, and daily survival intertwined in a raw and undeniable way.

In Silent Book, for example, the photographs are not accompanied by text. The visual narrative imposes itself through overlays, repetitions, and cuts, constructing a kind of “still cinema.” The absence of words intensifies the symbolic power of the images — closed eyes, sweaty bodies, dry blood, marked skins, peeling walls.

Miguel Rio Branco also stood out as a experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist. His short videos and installations expand the meaning of his photographs. His trajectory in cinema is less known than in photography, but no less relevant. Just like in photography, his cinema evokes, instigates, and disturbs.

Before diving into photography, Miguel Rio Branco had a f multidisciplinary artistic training. He studied at the School of Industrial Design in Montreal, attended the New York Institute of Photography and, crucially, also the University of Film and Television Munich (HFF München), in Germany — one of the most prestigious in the world. This background in cinema directly influenced the way he began to think about his photographs: as plans, sequences, visual narratives.

Rio Branco started making films in the 1970s, initially in super-8 and 16 mm, with a very experimental approach. His interest was not in traditional narrative cinema, but rather in a cinema of sensations.

Among his most recognized films, the following stand out:

1. “I will take nothing when I die, those who owe me will be paid back in hell” (1981)

This short film, about 20 minutes long, is considered his most important and cult film. Made with images captured in Salvador, it already anticipates themes of Maldicidade: urban decay, violent eroticism, profane religiosity, color as a dramatic element.

The film has no dialogues or conventional narrative. It is guided by a noisy, measured, almost ritualistic soundtrack. Its editing is elliptical, fragmented — closer to the logic of poetry than that of drama. The title is a citation that could be engraved on a wall or whispered by an absent character: it is about an existential revenge, a sentence against forgetting.

This film is a landmark of Brazilian experimental audiovisual language, being shown in international festivals and studied in film courses.

2. “Between the Eyes, the Desert” (1997)

This work is almost a filmic extension of Silent Book. It mixes archival images, photographs, and video with a nonlinear editing. It is a kind of audiovisual essay on silence, the body, and time. The soundtrack and sound composition play an essential role, reinforcing the sensory and dreamlike aspect.

Its cinematographic language is marked by an associative editing, instead of a linear narrative. It uses the fusion between sound and image to create emotional states. The focus is on the body, color, and texture. With the absence of dialogues, it requires complete immersion from the viewer.

For Miguel Rio Branco, cinema is not a parallel career to photography, but rather a natural extension of his visual language. In his words, he uses cinema as “a way to bring time into the image, as a way to breathe within the color.”

Although he has produced few films compared to his vast photographic work, Rio Branco has been recognized for his contribution to avant-garde cinema. His films have been shown in institutions such as:

• MoMA (New York)

• Centre Pompidou (Paris)

• Inhotim (Minas Gerais)

• In addition to experimental festivals and contemporary art circuits.

Few Brazilian photographers have managed to tension the limits between the documentary and the poetic as Miguel Rio Branco does. His photographic language, marked by violent chromaticism, labyrinthine compositions, and a brutal gaze on the body and urban space, not only records but exposes, tears apart, transforms.

Color, for him, is never decorative — it is an expression of flesh, rust, fever. His images often seem painted with dried blood, with sweat infused into the walls, with light filtered through bodies in ruin. The chromatic saturation, the precise use of red, ochre, and burnt blue carries symbolic weight: social violence appears less as explicit denunciation and more as atmosphere.

Rio Branco's camera does not seek the frontality of the classic documentarist. Many of his compositions break traditional rules of photography: the cuts are abrupt, the frames are often claustrophobic, and the elements overlap in visual and narrative layers. There is a direct relationship with cinematic editing, and with painting as well.

However, this radical language raises criticisms. Some question to what extent his photography escapes the aestheticization of misery. By placing marginalized bodies, such as boxers, prostitutes, homeless people, and transgender individuals, under a highly aesthetic light, in millimeter-perfect compositions, he flirts with the risk of turning suffering into visual fetish. It is a constant tension: his work does not directly denounce, but also does not romanticize. It exposes, and the discomfort generated may be its greatest merit.

Another crucial point: his work does not offer answers. There are no captions, no explanations, no redemption. The viewer is thrown into an oppressive and hypnotic environment. It is photography that demands presence and refuses the fast consumption of the image, typical of contemporary logic.

His language is tactile, full of friction. There is no possible neutrality. He photographs vulnerability with the rawness of one who has understood that the world is made of radical contrasts: between flesh and metal, silence and scream, love and abandonment.

In times of clean, quick, and sanitized images, his photography remains an open wound in the Brazilian visual imaginary.

Miguel Rio Branco is a fundamental figure for understanding contemporary Brazilian photography as a hybrid, poetic, and political field. He challenged the documentary tradition by poetizing reality without softening it, exposing suffering, eroticism, violence, and spirituality with intensity.

His work breaks with any idealization of Brazil, but also does not cling to pamphleteering denunciation. He constructs a poetics of the abyss, in which vulnerable bodies and spaces become visual monuments. His legacy lies precisely in the radicality of the gaze, in the autonomy of the image, and in the refusal of comfort.