Miguel Rio Branco
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 1946

Miguel Río Branco took vocational training courses at the New York Institute of Photography in 1966 and the Río de Janeiro College of Industrial Design in 1968. His father was a diplomat, and as a result he spent his childhood in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Berne and New York. He began his career as an artist with painting, which always remained his main field, though he sometimes set it aside for a while depending on his need to express himself. In the 1970s he worked as a freelance photographer and as director or director of photography on short and feature-length films. Pictorial art and films both influenced the work as a photographer for which he is best known.

The discourse of his photography is concerned with life in Latin America, so his work is sometimes described as photo-journalism. This idea is backed up by his collaboration with the Magnum Photos agency (from 1980 onwards) and with National Geographic. However, the Río de Janeiro-based artist takes every opportunity to protest at being pigeon-holed in this way. He sees himself as closer to a documentary photographer who brings together documentary-style recording and a personal, poetic viewpoint, thus venturing beyond mere record-making and into the terrain of conceptual art. He also insists that his work as an artist is a manifestation of internal ideas and concepts that have nothing to do with merely describing reality, even if what his camera captures is actually reality at all. He states that he does not focus only on Latin American topics but merely on what he has around him, be it in New York, Paris, Río de Janeiro or wherever else he may be living, and that this does not mean that he seeks to reflect a particular national identity. From the 1983 São Paulo Biennial onwards, a substantial shift can be seen in his work from the documentary to the poetic. At the same time, he began to produce multimedia installations. In formal terms, he constructs images using a small palette of vibrant, saturated colours in which chiaroscuro tends to play a leading role. As a result, many of his images have a disturbing quality.

He has won various awards over the course of his career as an artist, including the Grand Prix at the 1st Photography Triennial at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo (1980) and the Kodak Prize for Photo Critics (Paris, 1982, shared with two other artists). His work has been shown at the Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris, 1983), the Magnum Gallery (Paris, 1985), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 1989 & 2008), the Museum of Modern Art in Río de Janeiro (1996), the Tate Gallery in Liverpool (UK, 1999), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2001) and the Casa de América (Madrid, 2008).

Isabel Tejeda