PHOTO:Kurt Klagsbrunn -The Eye of Brazil
Kurt Klagsbrunn (6/51918-7/8/2005) was born 100 years ago in Floridsdorf. The son of a coal merchant and soccer official began studying medicine in Vienna, fled with the family via Portugal to Brazil, where he turned his passion for photography into a career and became a chronicler of Brazilian modernism and its working world.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Jewish Museum Vienna Archive
The exhibition “The Eye of Brazil” at Jewish Museum in Vienna presents the work of Kurt Klagsbrunn, who captured modern life in Brazil from 1939 until the 1970s. Kurt Klagsbrunn actually wanted to become a doctor, but had to change careers after his family escaped Nazi-occupied Austria, securing passage through Lisbon to Brazil and build a new life in exile. He chose his youthful hobby and quickly evolved from being a self-taught amateur to a pioneer of social photography. Klagsbrunn wasted no time: he took no less than 100,000 photographs of his new city. The austerity of his early pictures quickly gives way to crowded street scenes with a focus on character, whether a trolley fish seller, a carnival samba dancer, or a Carioca walking her dog in Copacabana. A chic young journalist eyes the camera suspiciously as a two white-coated waiters dote on her; a grisly greengrocer looks on tiredly from inside his shop. The exhibition includes clippings from the newspaper column in which many of the images originally appeared, “O que o turista nota no Rio” (What the tourist notices in Rio). His frame is more often frenetically clasped around action: the slope of a boardwalk, fitted so it almost bulges out of the frame, or a simple scene of men taking their coffee, so crammed with detail it appears a shade away from chaos. Paradoxes occur often, as in pictures of the mobilization of forces in World War II: graceful ballet dancers in white are surrounded by a gray mass of soldiers; in a group of dozens of nurses, a woman on the bottom right gives a dubious smirk. The photographer’s own off-kilter sense of humor is never out of sight. He photographed the parties of the wealthy and the leisure activities of the common people. His subjects were prominent personalities like Orson Welles or Evita Perón, but also freshly married young women throwing away their bridal bouquets, shoeshine boys on the boulevards or dreamy coffee drinkers. Apart from fashion, lifestyle, and industrial photographs, he documented the development of Brazil and recorded the building of the new capital Brasilia. Kurt Klagsbrunn died in Rio de Janeiro in 2005. Since then, his estate, including over 250,000 negatives, has been managed by his nephew Victor Klagsbrunn. In 2017, he donated some of this estate—letters, notes, photos, and other mementos of the life of the Klagsbrunn family in Floridsdorf and their escape to Rio—to the Jewish Museum Vienna.
Info: Curator: Andrea Winklbauer, Jewish Museum Vienna, Dorotheergasse 11, Vienna, Duration: 5/12/18-19/5/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri & Sun 10:00-18:00, www.jmw.at
