ESPASSO

Artistic photography has long faced the challenge of asserting itself as a medium for subjective expression, while being undeniably and inherently tied to the precise and factual recording of physical reality. For a long time, photography polarized itself around the documentary tradition, on one hand, and artistic photography, on the other. Today, however, the boundaries are becoming ever more blurred.

What we see in this work by Julio Bittencourt are images that, clearly, were negotiated—images that do not hide the influence of the photographer. The overall collage and the images that it comprises have been consciously constructed, with a specific meaning in mind: looking at windows, from windows, thereby reflecting our fragmentary experience with the city around us.

Yet despite the very obvious manipulations behind them, the images remain valid as documents, they make us face the reality they represent and touch the wounds felt daily by so many. These images do not offer an answer, but speak to the complexity of the forces at play. They reveal the absurdity of an urban policy in Sao Paulo that does not integrate its inhabitants into society but rather tries to shield it from them, and vice-versa.

After living in New York for six years, Julio returned to Brazil in 2000 and started working at the newspaper Valor Economico in Sao Paulo as a photographer and assistant photo editor. In 2003, he went to Mozambique and worked for SOICO Communications Group. Since 2006 Julio has been working as a freelance photographer for magazines, newspapers, advertising and corporate clients in Brazil, Europe, Canada, Japan and the United States, in addition to his personal projects. Julio’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and published in magazines such as Geo, National Geographic, Stern, Le Monde, The Guardian, Esquire, and Leica World Magazine, among others. In 2008 he published his first book, In a window of Prestes Maia 911 Building, the culmination of three years of work in a formerly squatted building in Sao Paulo. Julio currently lives in Sao Paulo and is represented in the United States by 1500 Gallery in New York City.