By Cláudia Linhares Sanz
Only in some few occasions photography accomplishes the role of image creator. Only in those opportunities it rekindles in us the childish impulse of subverting the destiny of things. It ignites that forgotten ability, normally possessed by children, of seeing something not immediately visible. It creates discontinuities; producing, then, new combinations between thing and sense.
The times when it happens, photography offers us eyes of oddity (it seems indeed that is it – the photography – that steals the photographer's pupils to concede us promiscuous usages). Those stolen eyes, with no name or owner, shared and crossed, not mine, not his, machine-like and humans, that (sometimes) provide an immersion in a unique atmosphere. Therefore, we feel surprised by the advance of creepers in urban areas. We then realize the strength with which they fuse with the city. Would be the boat forever abandoned, floating over tires? We cannot be sure. Maybe colors do not have that sweet and subtle depth. We are suspicious of what that door part us from. After all, how could we not have noticed it before? As photography, sometimes, concede us an understanding that known and unknown are not sequential states, but simultaneous.
It is not exactly about making visible what is invisible. But, on the contrary, it is about turning the visible, invisible. Transform inertia into abyss. Something happens when nothing rises from the surface. What is familiar to us, deepens in such a manner, that familiarity becomes the condition of its oddity. No: nothing. Nothing back, all quiet. No unusual event. No meaning beyond the plastic flung over the hillside; only the concrete, just the tangled electric wires. No evident gesture, no significant expression. Indeed, nothing photography could say or do is capable of estinguishing the banality of those objects. Nevertheless, it does (and says). In banality, emerges, thereby, the little excitement. A spell? It is the suspension, the movement. It is the paralysis that reveals (silently) the unfit. And, as a consequence, the shadow.
Occasionally, photography operates through alchemy, liberating the mystery of things with no mystery. All of a sudden, it interrogates us: was it brought to light what was secret? Or coming to light is what turns what is clear into secrecy? The moment photography produces an image, it infiltrates strangeness in what is habitual: in a light pole, a rock, a plant, in the asphalt. But how and why. What capacity could be this one, of liberating (as it does a wand of a wizard) the voice that does not speak?
In which moment (and in what way) everyday objects have become suspicious? And of what?
Photography, sometimes, promotes encounters between the ordinary world and the amplitude of its mysteries. It has the power of making us, in its own manner, cross a tiny white door in the middle of a stone wall and, simultaneously, it makes us also wait in front of it, standing still. It unfolds the name of things. It makes us feel the little displacement of senses and functions of familiar objects. It blends categories as natural and artificial. It produces new arrangements, it creates other meanings for what is domestic, and so, it moves away what is close. It turns passing, the fixed places. What is passing, becomes a fixed place.
The mystery, then, is apprehended through suspension. And the emptiness, through the landscape. The strangeness through normality. The material, though immaterial. The green, through blue. Little encounters, inside and outside the image. And if everyday life deepens itself when the image emerges, it is because we are no longer sure if it was only us that observed it. We recognize, even at a glance, certain behaviours of things. And if they are able to behave, it is probably because they are also able to make us realize the spelling of the strange language (of the lifeless objects).
Around the spreading of the city, the photographer collects affinities. Creates a new space – an inner space in each photograph, but also an outter one, that does not scape from it. The space of the sequences, of the perseverance and of the difference, of the margin and of the page. In this manner, Janaína Miranda proceeds weaving her work – embracing things she makes new presences possible.
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Cláudia Linhares Sanz is a professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Brasilia, professor and researcher of the Graduate Program in Communication also at UnB. She holds a PhD in Communication from the Fluminense Federal University with research at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Zentrum für Literatur - und Kulturforschung (ZfL – Berlin), in which she developed the research Images of the future and contemporary education.
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