Every year, the Roman and Medieval streets of Arles transform into a global stage for photography. Since its founding in 1970, the Rencontres d’Arles festival has been a hub for discovery. This year, among its many highlights, the festival presents a landmark exhibition: Construction Deconstruction Reconstruction, a sweeping survey of Brazilian modernist photography through the lens of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). It is presented on the LUMA campus and it’s one of the best shows.

Founded in São Paulo in 1939, the FCCB was no ordinary amateur club. At a time when Brazil was experiencing profound cultural shifts, Concrete and Neo-Concrete art, Cinema Novo, and Bossa Nova, the Bandeirantes turned photography into a laboratory of experimentation. Members explored every facet of the medium, from traditional landscapes to photograms, photomontages, and radical manipulations of negatives. Their work reframed the act of seeing, capturing a country in flux and a society navigating modernity.

The exhibition assembles works by thirty-three photographers whose contributions shaped this fertile moment. Names such as Geraldo de Barros, German Lorca, Thomaz Farkas, José Oiticica Filho, Marcel Giró, and Gertrudes Altschul anchor the show, presented alongside leading figures of Brazil’s Neo-Concrete movement including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica. Seen together, these artists collapse the boundaries between photography, painting, design, and poetry, offering a vision of modernism that is at once distinctly Brazilian and globally resonant.

The title, Construction Deconstruction Reconstruction, borrows from the rhythm of Brazilian concrete poetry. It encapsulates the FCCB’s modernist project.

Although recognized across Latin America, the Escola Paulista (São Paulo School of Photography) remains underexplored internationally. Arles offers a timely platform for modern photography.

In Arles, a city where Roman ruins stand beside contemporary galleries, the FCCB finds a fitting stage. The exhibition is both revelation and reckoning: a reminder that modernism was never a monologue of Europe and North America but a polyphonic chorus, with Brazil’s voices resonant, inventive, and urgently relevant today. The exhibition remains on view until 5th October.

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Image: José Yalenti, Paralelas e Diagonais, 1950, Courtesy of the Yalenti family.