A conversation with Miguel Rio Branco

Jörg M. Colberg

Today we launch a new series of conversations with various Magnum photographers. For our first conversation we invited Jörg M. Colberg, founder and editor of the fine-art photography blog Conscientious and experienced interviewer, to talk to Magnum photographer Miguel Rio Branco about his work and photography. This conversation is cross-published at Jörg's own blog. I hope you enjoy the read and please let us know what you think.

© Miguel Rio Branco/Magnum Photos

Jörg Colberg: When people hear "Magnum" I think many of them will think of classic b/w photojournalism. With its use of often very vibrant colour, your work clearly doesn't fall into that category. Now colour photography has been widely accepted, but it hasn't always been this way. Was using colour an obvious choice for you? And since you have a background as a director of photography for movies I'm wondering how much that also contributed to your development of your own photographic style?

Miguel Rio Branco: Today it is possible that when people hear Magnum they are not anymore seeing just traditional black and white, since there are already some members using color in an expressive way for some time, and also I see that Magnum is growing into a dynamic creative force with many individual paths and not only in the traditional photojournalistic way.

My own work was never only about color since after painting, in the beginning I did most of the time both, black and white and color, as well as experimental films (New York 1970-72). What happened is that in 1980, while living in São Paulo, my archives burned, and what was left were mostly the color slides that were traveling with me .

And my color, when I look at it now, I see it as not being really very colorful. Most were monocromatic, with some red and sometimes some blues here and there. Never the whole rainbow. One of the things that shows is that there is a dramatic use of color, and this relates a lot to my painting background. But painting is not only the background since I am still painting again since the mid eighties .

The other link is with cinema and music.

I was never really aware of the big names in photography until 1974, and this after already six years of using photography as my main medium. I lived in New York from 1970 to 1972, and never saw one exhibition of photography; my contacts were mostly with artists and movie people. So my influences came definitely from painting and cinema.

The act of editing came from the audiovisuals that I did at the time, the framing from the movie camera, the not cropping afterwards came from that situation as well as the lack of many verticals.

So my photographic style is basically a non-linear style, which depends very much on the construction of the images, the poetic links created with the images, and not with a linear aspect of framing and use of light and color.

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