EXHIBITION RECORD

Valdir Cruz: The Guarapuava Series

Saturday, August 28, 2004 through Sunday, November 28, 2004

A recipient of a 1996 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Brazilian-born photographer Valdir Cruz is internationally recognized as a humanistic photographer who has focused on Brazilian themes in his work. The Guarapuava Series was begun in 1982 and is an on-going photographic documentary depicting the people and landscape of Guarapuava, Brazil. These images introduce us to a part of the world that is still relatively untouched by modern technology. The images vary from portraits to landscapes, but mainly focus on the Tropeirism or Brazilian cattle herding tradition, a profession that died out in the late 1930s due to modern transportation means. Cruz has captured the lifestyle and attendant vocational aspects of these cowboys in these images, which were taken at the bi-annual Tropeirism revivals that occur.

Cruz has produced two other major bodies of work: Faces of the Rainforest, which focuses on the life and dying culture of a number of indigenous tribes from Brazil, Venezuela, and Peru, and Catedral Basilica de Nossa Senhora da Luz dos Pinhais, a portrait essay of the architectural beauty of a neo-Gothic cathedral in Curitiba, Brazil. His photographs can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.