Fotoforma from the series Fotoforma, 1949/2011

Created by cutting, layering, and enlarging black-and-white photo negatives, etching gestural marks into the surface of film, and making multiple superimposed photographic exposures that embrace chance occurrences, these abstract compositions belong to Geraldo de Barros’s Fotoformas (Photoforms) series. The series takes its title from an exhibition of the same name held in 1951 at the newly inaugurated Museu de Arte de São Paulo, which marked the first solo exhibition devoted to photography at a Brazilian museum and signaled the acceptance of photography—long dismissed as a technical craft—as a rich medium for artistic innovation. Influenced by early twentieth-century European avant- garde aesthetics and Gestalt psychology, de Barros explored the myriad formal and conceptual possibilities of simple lines and shapes. Many of his photographic constructions feature architectural elements such as windows and doorways, reflecting the contemporaneous modernization of urban space through his experimental practice.