I have just returned from a workshop trip from São Paulo, Brazil, a vertiginous and bustling city. My experience in returning from the city has been marked by an extended rumination on my experiences there. I am still processing the city, its architecture, and its artists whom I was very fortunate to meet in abundance. There is no easy way to contextualize São Paulo. It is a massive city, and its citizens come from a very diverse background. São Paulo, during the 19th and 20th centuries, was a destination for Italians, Japanese, Jewish, and Portuguese populations. The extensive slave trade and colonial experiences of the city’s African population cannot be undervalued in this exchange of how culture proliferates within the city, and more broadly, the country’s identity. This is what, despite the challenges of historical proximity to such topics, makes the São Paulo of today diverse and exceedingly rich in its cultural life.

During my visit to São Paulo, I had the opportunity to interview and become acquainted with many of the city’s photography enthusiasts, artists, curators, and publishers. I have taken notes, collected books, and initiated a series of meditations on my time there, primarily through the photobook community. I will be covering several of those titles here over the following months in an attempt to expose some of what I found. There will also be a series of podcasts through Nearest Truth in which the recorded conversations will be made available. Notably, Gui Marcondes extended an invitation to me to the workshop in São Paulo. Gui is a São Paulo native, but has also spent much of his time in New York. Nearest Truth Editions published his book, I Know I Exist Because You Imagine Me, in 2023, and his new book Ossada, was recently published by Up-and-Coming publishers Selo Turvo, a publisher that I had a great experience working with alongside, Panc Press, who helped coordinate our printed book from the São Paulo Syntax workshop. I mention all this as a backdrop for a series of books that I will be reviewing for American Suburb X over the next weeks and months as I digest and disseminate my experiences.

Vitor Casemiro’s Shadow Over Shadow (2023) somehow eluded me when it won the MASA/Photobook Museum Kassel Dummy Award a few years ago. I’m not sure why I didn’t see it. Still, it should have, as it addresses several concerning elements that I have been focusing on in my collection of photobooks, namely the use of vernacular photography, the cinematic photobook, and the true crime photobook. On the latter, I have begun researching the history of true crime and the photobook, uncovering some relatively early examples from the 1880s, as well as several interesting examples of scrapbooks, Bertillon catalogs, and subsequent investigations, from Germaine Krull to the present day musings of Valeria Cherchi (Some of You Killed Luisa) and Miguel Calderón’s Eden Is a Magic World. There are a surprising number of photobooks that cater to the topic, making Vitor’s book extremely helpful when riding, similar to Germain Krull and Brassaï’s work in the 1930s, as well as the hard-boiled film noir tropes that often circulate through press, literature (dime-store detective novels), and popular imagination.

Casemiro’s book is a study of the Library of Congress’s extensive collection of vernacular photography, which is made freely available for people to study, research, and use. Jeff Ladd and Bryan Schutmaat have made forays into the collection, which has also resulted in books, including A Field Survey of American Architecture (MACK) and Schutmaat’s Bleak House (Curated by me), offering, respectively. I mention this because the archive has a cult following of people who repurpose the material, which seems to have endless possibilities. In Casemiro’s instance, the material has become fodder for a lost script for a noir film in which the author succeeds in directly tying together the Weegee-like imagery into a cohesive idea, with fragmented textual alignments that suggest a knowledge of how the antiquated lingo of Dashiell Hammet or Raymond Chandler might approach the visual material the artist is sifting through without landing too hard on linguistic pastiche. Of course, some of this has to be implied as noir itself, not the neo-noir we think of now, had specific tropes that the artist wants to investigate. In cinematic terms, of recent times, one might suggest James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential as being a good similar marker in which the lingo is believable.

Throughout the book, I am reminded of many of the greats of true crime photography, particularly the low-hanging fruit of Weegee. I could also suggest Katherine Dunn’s Detective Scrapbook as an interesting parallel. However, Casemiro is less about shock than he is about the holistic sale of an idea that performs with historic precedent from our combined and futuristic perspective. The effect, in summation, is one of believability and one that sutures the photobook to the cinematic, a function of the photobook that I often see as underdeveloped when considering sequencing and narrative arcs. Although the book does not rely on soft images or transitions between images to carry the story, preferring singular photos, the idea remains relatively cohesive. It is like a series of film stills have been pulled together to create a mood board for the script, which will in turn become a cinematic investigation. I find it rather astute of the artist, and I think this model could, despite the rise of AI treatment in script selling, become something process-driven, human-made, and valuable for a sagging film industry that seems out of ideas and is standing on the precipice of extinction in the face of artificial intelligence programs.

It’s worth saying out loud that if we want to preserve our creativity, arts, and entertainment industries, we will need to stop relying on AI and opt for human-made forms of support. We are what we consume. If we opt for that which is artificial…we become…

Shadow Over Shadow is a great book. Casemiro is a young and highly energetic representative of young Brazilian photography. He creates work, publishes books, and has also founded his own publishing house, all at a remarkably young age. Let’s see if he stays in photography. One gets the sense that film might be in his future. Highly Recommended.

Vitor Casemiro

Shadow Over Shadow

MAS/Photobook Museum/Kassel Dummy Award