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The Dark Side of the Sun

Alexandro Auler - 2014

Digital photography. Printing on Hanhemuhle Photo Rag paper

80,00 cm height x 120,00cm width x 0,10 cm depth

USD 1.090,00

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Product code: 14655

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THE ARTIST

Alexandro Auler

“Photography is a way of calling attention to facts and moments that go unnoticed in the rush of day-to-day life.”

Brazil’s largest shantytown (favela), the Rocinha, which started in 1913 as a provider of fruit and vegetables to street markets in Rio’s prosperous South Zone – and now has a population of 130,000, mainly migrants from other states of Brazil – lies surrounded by luxury residential buildings, hotels and a golf club, between Gávea and São Conrado – two prestige districts which have the highest cost of living in the country.

Violence and shootouts are part of the Rocinha’s routine – while the gorgeous São Conrado beach serves as a landing place for those taking off by hanglider or paraglider from the spectacular 2,000-foot Pedra Bonita, looms gloriously above the region. The beach, though not always chosen for swimming due to the sewage allowed to flow directly into the sea, is extremely ‘democratic’. People come to use it both from the Rocinha, which is very close, and also from the surrounding luxury residential condominiums.

Photographer Alexandro Abbadie Auler finds the essential raw material for his creation in this type of scenario, so full of social contrast. The stage-set of his series "The Dark Side of the Sun" is the sea at São Conrado beach, transferring life and movement to his images. His focus is on bathers, giving a new meaning to the typical sea/cityscapes of Rio.

As Pablo Picasso noted, “there is only one way to see things – until something shows us how to see them with different eyes”.

The photographer finds the essential raw material for his creation in Brazil’s largest shantytown (favela), the Rocinha, a type of scenario full of social contrast.

In spite of the poetry in the images of his beach series, Alexandro Auler’s references are definitively documentary. As influences, he credits Juca Martins, the Portuguese humanist photographer who moved to Brazil, documenting the last four decades of Brazilian history; the Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths, known for his coverage of the Vietnam War; and the celebrated Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa, who covered the most important conflicts of the first half of the 20^th century.

Inspired by all of these – among others – in 2015 he travelled for three months in Turkey, Syria and Iran, where he photographed the resistance of men and women soldiers in the Kurdish army. This experience led to a documentary – in one month in Kobane, the Kurdish-Syrian city on the frontier with Turkey, he recorded the soldiers who risked their lives warring with ‘Islamic State’ to protect their homes and retake their city. The production shows some singular events, including funerals and the celebration of Newroz, a Kurdish New Year. The documentary also has witness statements and interviews with women soldiers who rejected male chauvinist cultural impositions, and fought for their territory on a level with men: a testimony of resistance and hope. It won two awards at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards; was voted best film by both jury and the public at the Los Angeles Cine Fest; and won the Golden Cine award of the Headline International Film Festival, and the Top Indie Film Award for best documentary and best editing.

Auler was born in Alegrete, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in 1976 – the Pampas at the frontiers with Uruguay and Argentina. He began to photograph professionally in 1996 as an intern on the Rio de Janeiro daily newspaper O Dia, from 2001 to 2010. Living in Recife, in Brazil’s Northeast, he worked as a photographic reporter on that city’s Jornal do Comércio. His photo series Bandidolândia (‘BandidLand’), on a rebellion by inmates at the Aníbal Bruno prison, was a finalist in the Nuevo Periodismo Journalism Award promoted by the Gabriel Garcia Marques Foundation.

He covered the recovery from the sea of the victims of Air France flight 447 – on the Fernando de Noronha archipelago – and became a stringer for Getty Images Latin America, for which he covered the finals of the Libertadores de America in Porto Alegre and the Desafio das Américas at the La Bombonera stadium of Buenos Aires in 2012. Among innumerable assignments he also covered the Rio Carnival samba schools’ parades from 2010 to 2014, and the 2011 Rock in Rio festival. From 2011, he worked as a freelancer for two Rio de Janeiro newspapers of the Infoglobo group, Lance and Extra.

In 2014 and 2015 he spent two seasons in Italy, where he photographed protests by groups against the Jobs Act proposed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, in Rome, Milan, Naples and Bologna. In 2015 he was also in Ukraine, photographing the pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

Since 2016 he has worked as a freelance photographer and cameraman in documentary photography and video, working with digital SLRs. He gives workshops on documentary photography, visual storytelling, and photography with smartphones. His images have been published in Brazil in the three leading newspapers, São Folha de Paulo, O Estado de São Paulo, and O Globo, and the magazines Veja and Época; and outside Brazil in the Guardian, Vanity Fair and Paris Match.

He is pragmatic: “Photography is a way of calling attention to facts and moments that go unnoticed in the rush of day-to-day life”.

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