Artelogie http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie2/spip.php?article351 Specters of brazilian history in the early photographic work of Mario Cravo Neto Alice Heeren / Alice Heeren is a PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in the RASC/a : Rhetorics of Art, Space and Culture Program. Her research centers on affect theory and memory studies in relation to modern and contemporary art and architecture in Brazil and the construction of a national identity. She is currently the sub-editor of Latin American Visual Arts for the upcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. mercredi, 8 avril 2015 / ev Abstract : Mario Cravo Neto is one of the most important contemporary photographers in Brazil. His works show a complex marriage of aesthetic lyricism, sculptural monumentality, and afro- Brazilian themes. In this paper, I am interested in comparisons that have been resisted by other scholars of Cravo Neto’s work. Particularly, I focus on the way his photographs work against the documentary and ethnographic tradition in Brazil. By looking at a series of earlier works by Cravo Neto, I will argue that the legacy of the Black Atlantic archive is an undercurrent in the artist’s work that at times transpires in eloquent ways. INTRODUCTION Mario Cravo Neto was born in 1947 in the city of Salvador in Bahia. He travelled extensively during his life, spending large periods of time in Europe and North America where he was exposed to a diverse milieu of contemporary artists. He returned to Brazil in 1970 from which time he worked on sculpture and photography and lived in Salvador, Bahia until his death in 2009. In this study, I focus, particularly, on Cravo Neto’s earlier work, the series produced in black and white between 1987 and 1998 and published in the book The Eternal Now edited by the artist and Edward Leffingwell (Leffingwell 2002) by Aries Editora in Brazil. A large format luxurious publication, it has one introductory text by Leffingwell. [1 ] As a larger universe, the photographs found in the publication The Eternal Now have some discerning features. First, the images are in their majority portraits of one single subject produced in studio with very few objects and no specific background. The objects that are present are central to the compositions. Secondly, the male body is featured prominently, its percentage being 2 to 1 to portraits of women and 3 to 1 to those of children. Finally, the body overwhelms the space of the compositions and the way the artists crops the bodies privileges specific parts of them, he presents essentially bodies in pieces. Scholars of Mario Cravo Neto’s work interpret this group of photographs very differently and in order to situate my analysis, which works against the grain of the previous scholarship, I begin in this paper by introducing the literature. The work of the artist has been interpreted through different lenses in Brazil and abroad. Tadeu Chiarelli summarizes well the literature on Cravo Neto when he says that “the photography of Mario Cravo Neto demands for itself the quality of work of auteur, since his photographs of almost predominantly black sitters, presented in hieratic poses, configure a personal interpretation of Afro-Brazilian myths (Chiarelli 2002).” Add to these ideas : firstly the prevailing attention to the sculptural and at times tectonic nature of the bodies presented in the artist’s photographs, that Cézar Bartholomeu comments is the very force of Cravo Neto’s strategy (Bartholomeu 2007) ; [2 ] secondly, the attention paid to the mystical evocation of his work as highlighted by Fernando Castro Ramírez and Giulina Scimè (Scimè 2009) ; and thirdly, the familiar nature of the people, and objects, that Cravo Neto collects from his everyday (Leffingwell 2002), and we have a working understanding of the interpretations of Cravo Neto’s oeuvre. One question in specific, the role of ritual in the work of Cravo Neto has been the most discussed aspect of his production even though few scholars engage thoroughly with this question. [3 ] In this paper, I am interested in approaching topics and comparisons that have been resisted by other scholars, even if at times they have been hinted at in this literature. Particularly, I reference