Claudio Edinger - Photographic Career

Photographic Career

Claudio Edinger was born in Rio de Janeiro in May 1952 and before his second birthday his family moved to São Paulo. He has said that in his mind he has often thought his soul was in São Paulo and his heart in Rio. This love of both places, he believes, shows in his photographs of both cities.

Edinger may well be the contemporary master of the photographic series. Taking his cue from Tolstoy's phrase, "without knowing who I am, life is impossible", Edinger, from the beginning of his career, has used his camera as a research tool trying to explore his chosen subject matter in great detail, often to its depths. It is research that is often highly charged emotionally both to Edinger and to the viewer of his photographs.

Edinger's first series of photographs began in 1975 when he chose to explore the Martinelli Building in São Paulo, his home city. At one time the Martinelli was the tallest and most exclusive apartment building in São Paulo. When Edinger began his (photographic) essay on the Building, it had been reduced to a vertical slum.

One can say that by exploring a subject in depth, Edinger had set the template of his aesthetic that the camera can be used to explore in depth which has resulted in over thirteen books dealing with specific subjects.

In order to widen his knowledge of the world and to try to examine his own roots, Edinger left Brazil for New York, which was then the heart and center of the photographic world. Edinger chose to live among and photograph the Hassidic Jews of Brooklyn. In a series of startling black and white photographs taken over two years, Edinger was able to capture a broad portrait of the traditions and joys of the Hassidic community. After being introduced to Cornell Capa by Philippe Halsman in 1978, he was invited to exhibit his depiction of Brooklyn's Hassidic life at the International Center of Photography.

After Edinger's stay in Brooklyn, he moved to the historic Chelsea Hotel, a Bohemian, for want of a better word, oasis where many notable people in the arts and eccentrics chose to live either in transit or permanently. Among the many residents, at one time or another, were many painters who had studios there as well as musicians such as Bob Dylan, Virgil Thompson, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin who spent time there. Edinger photographed in telling, but sympathetic portraits many of the famous, as well as the eccentric personalities who were never to become famous who inhabited the world of the Chelsea Hotel in the late 1970s. The series of portraits resulted in Edinger's first large scale book, "Chelsea Hotel" published by Abbeville Press in 1983. The book, his first solely of portraits, was a landmark achievement in exploring diverse group of eccentric people often having only one thing in common, their residence at the Chelsea Hotel. The book is a classic photographic record of the late 70's, early 80s.

From the Chelsea, in 1984, Edinger moved to Venice Beach, California. During the late 1960s and '70s, Venice Beach was a center of the counter-culture and a fertile field for Edinger's camera, photographing the many odd and the bizarre people who had come there to be near the sea and enjoy the beach culture. In a sense this was an extension of Edinger's work at the Chelsea Hotel, but here the people had not only pretensions to the arts, but were also concerned with their bodies and the beach. The series of photographs Edinger took at this time allowed the photographer to put his subjects in a wider landscape than the narrow confines of the Chelsea Hotel. In a sense the book, "Venice Beach", that resulted from this period is pivotal in Edinger's development as it prepared him for his next adventure when he went to India in 1986.

Edinger's transition to India became a period of great creative and spiritual experiment and growth. He began to use color in his photographs and the holy city of Varanasi played a vital role in awakening his dormant recognition of his own need for a deeper spirituality that had begun in Brooklyn. Using a newly acquired Hasselblad camera, he was able to photograph in medium format the excitement and whirl of people and places of India that in many ways captures the essence of India as both an accepted insider and a foreigner discovering the essence of the country's spiritual nature. This has resulted in the ongoing project of a series of photographs of Northern India.

Upon his return to Brazil Edinger had to cope with the reality of trying to understand the consequences of Alzheimer's disease on a most personal nature. His beloved grandmother had been affected by the disease and he was moved to bring attention to the treatment of madness and dementia in Brazil and possibly in other places in the world where the mentally ill are often warehoused in asylums and become even more truly mad, This led to his series of photographs inside the Juqueri, Latin America's largest insane asylum. In order to seek out and understand the depth of what occurs there Edinger moved inside the asylum to live among the people housed there. The result of his search was the receipt of the Ernst Haas Award from the Maine Photographic Workshop. When he showed these harrowing photographs to Cornell Capa, he was met with the question, "Who would want to see this?" After seven years of showing the work around to various publishers it was finally accepted and published by DBA (Brazil) and Dewi Lewis (UK) and it is now a seminal work of photography depicting the mentally ill. While seeking publication of Madness, Edinger began a project that was to occupy him for the next five years: the photographing of Brazil's Carnaval, the institutionalized madness of Brazil. From 1991 to 1995 he photographed five different regions of Brazil - Rio, Salvador, Recife/Olinda, São Paulo and Paraty during Carnaval. The book was published in 1996. This project established Edinger as a truly Brazilian photographer, now with an established international reputation, back on to his native soil after twenty years abroad in New York.

Other books followed. Old Havana, a portrait in color of the decay of a once exquisite colonial architecture kept barely alive by its vibrant inhabitants. This book was published simultaneously in English, Portuguese and German.

In 2000 Edinger's Cityscapes was published by DBA (Brazil). It is an autobiographical work of reflection and discovery about his time in New York as a photographer living in a foreign city. Using an outsider's view to see and experience one of the most photographed cities in the world Edinger was able to photograph the city in a fresh way.

This prepared him for his return to Brazil to confront through his photography, in the year 2000, the city of Rio where he was born. There, through his camera, this time using a large format Sinar 4 x 5 and black and white film, the ambiguity of spaces in large cities that he first found in New York is realized. What emerges is a very personal series of photos that excite the viewer as well as the photographer showing the connection to his subject matter in the most intimate and poetic way. Working with selective focus and a large format camera Edinger's work has evolved into a somewhat surreal study that one art critic has called the invention of neo-espressionism in photography. It is one of the most personal statements by a photographer now practicing his art.

The books that have subsequently come from his use of the large format camera and his experimental use of color, notably his most recent exploration of São Paulo have been a giant step in Edinger's work resulting in a widening acceptance of Edinger's photographs in exhibitions at art galleries, museums and private collections.