At São Paulo’s @imoreirasalles @ims.paulista , the doors open onto Agnès Varda the photographer @agnesvarda.officiel - a Varda sometimes overshadowed by the filmmaker, yet whose eye, before ever becoming a camera, was first a lens, a sheet of light-sensitive paper, a place of revelation. With more than two hundred images, many of them never shown before, the exhibition Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema offers a journey through the visual fragments that shaped her gaze.
Before becoming a towering figure of cinema, Agnès Varda (1928–2019) was a young woman working in her darkroom-studio on rue Daguerre, where she developed not only her photographs but her way of inhabiting the world. As the official photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire and a traveller attentive to China, Cuba, and the United States, she captured faces, delicate gestures, and fleeting places as one might jot down notes to better hold on to the real. Photography accompanied her throughout her life, quietly infusing her films, her installations, her artistic movements - one of the rare creators to let the still image and the moving image breathe together without hierarchy.
The exhibition places these photographs in dialogue with a selection of her films screened at the IMS Cinema, tracing the subtle threads that connect the two sides of her work. Here we rediscover her singular way of approaching people and places: a grace without emphasis, a taste for the unexpected, a keen sense of territories — those we cross and those we inhabit. Always, her “curious eyes” opened onto the world as a poetic, political, profoundly human playground.
By revealing the quiet force of her photographic practice, Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema illuminates an artist whose entire life was an art of looking — an art of gathering time, weaving encounters, and turning images into places where we can breathe a little more deeply.
printing by @granondigital
Curators : João Fernandes and @rosalievarda
Assistant Curator : Horrana de Kássia Santoz
opening november 29th
@institutphoto @galerieobadia