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Films & Photographs
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Frans Krajcberg, November 2011
Frans Krajcberg finds in photography a way to accomplish his artistic mission with a weapon far more powerful than aesthetics. His testimony is indisputable and can be reproduced endlessly. He does not consider himself a photographer, despite the high quality of his images. Photography is an ideal tool to denounce the drama in progress: the destruction of nature, a frozen image of a world that is disappearing forever.
Behind the lens, Frans Krajcberg has preserved an undisturbed force of wonder, gaze and soul on permanent alert. Every day, he works his gaze as an artist and feeds into his “revolt” by tirelessly photographing the details of this fascinating nature, which he admires so much the resilience. Photography has become essential for him to alert on a large scale and transmit his message to future generations.
Pierre Restany, in the Rio Negro Manifesto, evokes the humility and availability of the photographer’s gaze: “ To practice this availability in relation to the natural is to admit the modesty of human perception and its own limits, in relation to a whole that is an end in itself. This discipline in the awareness of one’s own limits is the first quality of the good reporter . »
Thousands of photographs taken by Frans Krajcberg show nature deliberately destroyed by man. Fire is real and the destructive action is irrecoverable. The pictures do not only reveal the horror, they also confront the beauty of nature and its disappearance; the diversity of colors of the lands of Minas Gerais and the blackness of the burns of Paraná; the magic and transparency of indestructible stones and the ephemeral time of a flower; the fragility of a young shoot and the ashes of a thousand-year-old tree.
The macro-photographic technique he uses gives striking images that reveal the smallest particle in movement: the veins of a leaf, the pistil of a flower, the texture of soil, the path of small animals and insects, the traces of a snake on the ground, the labyrinth of a spider’s web, the transparency of the skin of a larva...
His films allow him to capture movements of life in slow motion, almost motionless, with a fascinated gaze following the slightest quiver. His camera gives him a new tool to capture the imperceptible movements of water, wind or light. Under his eye appear pictorial works, often abstract, with a perfectly mastered plastic beauty.
Films and photographs magnify life even when images testify destruction: trees have lost their original verticality to form a new landscape, white grounds - products of burning - have taken the place of green expanses ... the plant world has transformed into a mineral world, emptied of all animal substance... but a leaf emerges, a flower is reborn... in the midst of ashes ... life reappears , infinitely fragile and beautiful.
Once again, Frans Krajcberg chooses to rise, to reveal, to prove and to resist. "My work is a manifesto. I don’t know how to write, I’m not a politician... I must find the image that characterizes my cry of revolt. Photography has helped me capture the moment of beauty, of destruction, to record what is disappearing."
