MIGUEL RIO BRANCO. OEUVRES PHOTOGRAPHIQUES/ PHOTOGRAPHIC WORKS 1968-1992

The photographs of Miguel Rio Branco, as Jean-Pierre Criqui has noted in the text accompanying the hundred or so images that make up the publication, "offer us a vast catalog of texture and matter, assembled with a sensitive eye in tune with the esthetic transmutations of the most humble, vile motifs. (Baudelaire on the ragman, in Artificial Paradises: 'Everything the city rejects, everything it has lost, disdained and broken, he labels and collects. He consults the archives of debauchery and the dregs of society. He sorts through them all to make intelligent choices; he gathers, like a miser his treasure, the rubbish which, once digested by the divinity of industry, will become objects of use and property.') Texture and matter are characterized here by excess (which explains the 'asphyxia' MRB speaks of in photography): excess of life in all directions and its inseparable counterpart—death at work.