Peter Francis Lawlor

On his journeys through the streets of Rio, Peter Francis Lawlor was taken aback by the images he saw, when he arrived in 1994.   Since then, cameras always at the ready, he sought out with curiosity and interest the ever yday Carioca happenings with itinerant eyes. Every unusual moment is captured with his daring and investigative lens.  Ipanema, Leblon, Downtown,  the  cities’  north  side  with  their  characteristic  scenes,  nothing  escapes  this foreigners  eyes,  between  surprise  and  fascination,  little  by  little  familiarizing  himself  with each particular scene.

Maybe driven by his own contradictions, this Canadian-Irish photographer captures the wide contrasts which the city denounces to his attentive lens.  Driven also by ambivalence between foreigner and  resident he  manages to  render the  ambiguities of  the  city,  whether good or bad.

Rio of the violence, urgency, samba, beaches, carnival.  Rio  of the wonderful nature, exuberant, a beauty that takes your breath away.  Rio of the assault rifles protruding through the delapated police car windows.  Rio of the  muggings, street children selling chewing gum or juggling tennis balls in front of motorists stopped at the red light, which when turns green frantically beep to demand movement.  Rio of the many hills, dotted with Shanty Towns and millionaire mansions and green forests which stubbornly resist the axe.  Rio carries in every contradiction an exhibition in itself.  Rio with poverty and beauty; with cripples exposing their ailments,  with  beautiful  tanned  women  flaunting  their  curvy  manicured  bodies.     Rio  of candomblé, of all the saints.   Rio of sin and pleasure… all of this reveals itself to the photographers lens at the moment of taking…Rio kitsch, lovely, rare, ugly or sexual: every
image is rendered poetic.  Even when the poetry doesn’t show beauty his lens makes poetry. This is the job of the curious and sensitive artist.

Interested in capturing the moment, this artist-photographer, Ipanema dweller, needs to reveal reality in action.  The anguish comes from not understanding the facts that escapes the reality through deformities and contrasts, only tranquilized with the necessity of making sense with the act of photography.  It’s because of this that Peter Lawlor’s images chronic the city of Rio de Janeiro, synthesized through the optical poetry of the artist.  Through his photographs we can read the contemporary history of the city.

His images endeavour to presents a city of garbage and luxury, using the photographs themselves to at times distort the deformed reality by finding an already deformed surface, such  as  a  reflection, to  reinforce the  deformity.     To  this  end  he  takes  advantage of  both natural  and  artificial  surfaces.    What  he  insistently  looks  for  is  to  find  forms  within  this deformity that gives sense to the life of the city which the photographer craves to understand. Sometimes the city is seen through a poodle to embody the inversion as a mirror of itself. The  pleasure,  the  beauty,  the  lingerie,  the  refined  lovers,  always  shown  on  billboards, magazines and newspapers hanging on the newsagents stands.   A world only assessable in this way to the common folk, fixated by these images and simply accepting what always will remain out of reach.   It is exactly at this point where the common citizen and the artist mix because both use the look and the imagination through the illusion or the reality.

The title ”The Black and White of  Rio”   doesn’t necessarily refer to  the predominant usage of B & W images but pertains more to the black and white reality of the Rio.   Through the game of reflecting light and shadow, Rio is exposed between   the static photograph and the movement of the scene in which the swagger  continues in the image.  Here is where the visual sensibility of the artist manages to extend a déjà vu image which the lens transforms to a  brand  new  image.    In  this  way  the  banal  image  the  Carioca  is  used  to  seeing  amazes because the everyday scene is transformed by the singularity of the photograph.  And so the photographer surprises  both  the  foreigner  and  the  native  of  the  city  who  are  left  with  the same impact of the unusual.

 

Virginia Heine
August 2004