Chronicles of São Paulo : Brazilian street photographer and filmmaker Rodrigo Koraicho talks about street photography, his theories and his project Ô Culpa.
Copyright ⓒ Rodrigo Koraicho
This is going to be interesting, is my first impression, and he doesn’t disappoint.
“I share the idea,” street photographer and film maker Rodrigo Koraicho is telling me. “That we get inspiration from many things around us, creating a wide repertoire that comes from childhood and includes our relations with people around us, the books we read, the music we like…”
He hints at the whole thing being holistic. A developmental, maybe better explained as an organic, theory of photography influenced by many aspects of life that have a direct and lasting impact on us including the sounds we listen to, the movies we watch, the literature we read.
I can’t disagree.
Okay, I admit, it is a huge philosophical leap and I am not at all sure how it is all supposed to work but I won’t deny – and sometimes you have to own these things – I would be the first to endorse it.
After all human beings don’t live in an existential vacuum. Now do they?
Copyright ⓒ Rodrigo Koraicho
So, what is he saying exactly? What you see in the street photography of street photographers, indeed, photographers everywhere, is the culmination of years and years of all their life experiences – including influences from music, film and books – manifest in the stuff they shoot?
Maybe…
But, as we will discover, Rodrigo Koraicho’s work can be multi-dimensional with photography being only one element in the overall story he is trying to narrate.
He does think, however, of what he does as somehow unplanned?
“I don’t usually look for themes or subjects that I want to work with,” Koraicho explains. “Most of the time this happens kind of organically. For example, in ‘Disritmia’ I went out with my wife and friends to enjoy the street carnival in São Paulo carrying my camera. When I get back, I liked a lot the result of having fun while… simultaneously [taking photographs] so I kept doing that over the years.”
The voice fades, falls silent, we wait.
“Ô Culpa (an ongoing project Rodrigo has been working on since 2019),” he continued. “Was, somehow, like that too.”
Copyright ⓒ Rodrigo Koraicho
Koraicho’s home town, São Paulo, has a population of around 12.5 million and more than 22 million in its metropolitan sprawl. It is the largest urban centre in Brazil and has a massive housing problem. Homelessness in the city is on a huge scale and there are people living in sub-standard, insanitary conditions all over the city.
It is well documented that in Brazil increasing unemployment, rising prices (especially in terms of rent, some of which have doubled over the last year) and a reduction in benefits and crisis payments during the pandemic have pushed many, often single mothers with children, out onto the streets.
Rodrigo got to know some of these people in São Paulo and started to photograph the lives of 35 homeless families living beneath an underpass in the Bom Retiro neighbourhood.
“I began my relationship with the people living in this occupation when I was [taking] photographs on the street and two women [who] were living there came to talk to me,” Rodrigo explained. “They were intrigued that I was talking to and photographing a person living on the street and invited me to go to see the place [where] they were living. It was an immediate warm welcome and I first started by getting to know the people and the place… before pulling out my camera.”
Copyright ⓒ Rodrigo Koraicho
In many ways it was an accidental union between Rodrigo and his subjects. They ran into each other at a certain time, in a certain era of history and a certain geographical location.
From this Ô Culpa was born, and, in time, selected for a solo exhibition at the TCU Cultural Centre in Brasília.
“At that time, we had to keep social distance,” Rodrigo said. “I was already thinking on other approaches I would like to bring to this exhibition. So, I worked also with installations, children’s drawings, poems, objects, sound and a short film.
“All the installations were made with materials found in the street by me or donated by the residents of the occupation. This is the only way many of these people have to build their homes from what is discarded.”
Rodrigo Koriacho, as a photographer, is always seeking, always looking and always curious. It is an important aspect of his work.
Ô Culpa is an exciting project, and he only stumbled across the idea for this continually growing artwork when he was out operating as a street photographer. The collaboration continues and Rodrigo finds this aspect of his work very important.
We wandered onto the value of photography and how it could be used as a tool for helping humanity and he was immediately animated.
Copyright ⓒ Rodrigo Koraicho
“This is an important question that has been asked by many people who work in, write about or study photography,” he agreed. “I think photography can be a vehicle for good purposes but of course it has its limitations.
“During the time of my master’s degree studies I came across Susie Linfield’s book, ‘The Cruel Radiance’ (subtitled Photography and Political Violence), and despite a more specific immersion on war photographers and photographs of suffering, it’s interesting how she presents the role of photography in its many uses and how important photography is for…society to create institutions such as Médecins Sans Frontières or Greenpeace.”
Rodrigo is a fascinating, thoughtful man, and I soon discover that his interest in photography, and street photography in particular, started when he was 16 years-old.
Copyright ⓒ Rodrigo Koraicho
“I saved money to buy my first camera (a Nikon FM2),” he revealed. “Started to photograph things in my daily life. When I turned 18, I started to get some small commissioned jobs. At college I was studying advertising when a friend of mine indicated me to a job opportunity as a photographer’s assistant in an advertisement agency.
“It was a good learning experience because we used to have a lot of work and we had to photograph many different things. Four years later I opened my own studio with a friend of mine. With time I gradually started to develop and dedicate myself more and more to my personal projects building a body of work which is what I am fully focused on today.”
As well as the ongoing project Ô Culpa, Rodrigo is also working on a project around his late father, who the family lost to cancer in April 2021. To these ends he has been taking photographs and writing poetry about the process of loss.
It was soon becoming apparent to me, if it hadn’t been apparent before, that Rodrigo’s photography is penetrative. That is to say he is looking for more beyond just the shot he is taking. Looking for something more from the image, a story perhaps, a flickering moment of what it is to be human and from Ô Culpa the condition we sometimes find ourselves in, individually and collectively.
“I try as much as possible not to create barriers in my practice,” Rodrigo is explaining to me. “My work explores many aspects of society as a whole, but also social issues [and] seeking to challenge the distinction between visual narratives, authorship and the documentary potential in photography.”
Copyright ⓒ Rodrigo Koraicho
Rodrigo Koraicho is not just a street photographer, he is not just a photographer, and he doesn’t see photography as the only means of communication.
“Some of my works,” he tells me, “Are multidisciplinary, allowing me to also embrace installations, video, poetry, sound and objects into my practice.”
Photography, whether that be street photography, documentary photography or photojournalism can tell a powerful, visual story and can be a valuable weapon in the battle against social injustice and poverty and war.
To simply describe Koraicho as a street photographer would be to miss part of the essence of the man. He is much more and yet, and simultaneously, that is a large part of what he does. Okay, he might group it into a project which gives testament to the resilience and courage of people left homeless, but I see him as a photographer and an artist who is keen to push boundaries.
“We have seen photography help change laws,” he says thoughtfully. “And shift… human behaviour… over… history, so it can be valuable for us, but, in my opinion, our visual society that depends so much on photography today is still crawling in terms of understanding and dealing with it.”
I have a feeling he might be right.
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