Portfolio Category - Portrait Awards 2014

Photographer Fernanda Chemale’s “Retratos Clássicos do Rock Gaúcho” series, is a work in process. She has been meeting and revisiting the protagonists of the music scene in Porto Alegre. The musicians are individually photographed without their stage costumes, offering particular dialogue in search of the identity of what we know as “rock gaúcho”. Connected to rock music since the late 80s, Fernanda Chemale reveres musicians from her hometown, Porto Alegre, , by presenting portraits exhibiting the maturity and resistance of artists who have chosen music as their lifestyle, creating a style that represents this kind of music in Southern Brazil. A Performance Notion in Photography " Whereas human representation in photography, since its invention, has always been part of some ritual ceremony that has accompanied, for instance, iconography of photographic portrait, we can say that photography – as the first truly popular art that enlarged possibilities of seeing oneself in images – is, par excellence, a performing art. The history of rock, in this axis of reasoning, also passes through some imaginary constituted by photographic images. The universe of rock and roll and its protagonists, are celebrations of the present time through memories of the past time and the ritualistic sense that keeps on involving this segment of contemporary culture. Just like in the age-old notion of party, in which musicality was a mandatory element, in Chemale’s Classic Portraits of Rock from Rio Grande do Sul we find imagery thought questioning itself regarding the boundaries between different arts. Is it possible to turn sound into image? Just like Dali’s ecstasy, in Fernanda’s silent photographs we are invited not to listen, but to feel the musicality surrounding her registers, since we are in a transitory visual space. What is rock, after all, if not vertigo, ecstasy, inquietude, performance?" Alexandre Santos, Historian and Art Critic