Marcos Chaves was interviewed by Karen Marta over Zoom in May 2024.

Karen Marta
Your forthcoming book, It Looked and I Looked Back, is essentially made up of photographs that you took separately—during different times in different places on different dates—and that we then put in pairs to create diptychs. When did you first start taking these photographs?


Marcos Chaves
I started my practice as an artist, not as a photographer, and as a student I studied architecture, so three-dimensional space is important to me. At the time, studying architecture or design was the choice of a kid who wanted to work with art outside of the academy, which was very antiquated, very old-school. In architecture school, I took lessons with Lygia Pape, who was a key figure in the Neo-Concrete Movement in Brazil, so that was important. And just living in Rio was formative, too. It is a city that has many contrasts; you can find very rich people and very poor people, surrounded by all kinds of architecture. It was the capital of the country for many years, the colonial country, the Imperial country. So you have all these diversities: in architecture, in the street, and in our senses, and it was the most important city in the country, too.

I started a work in the mid-’90s in which I was collecting benches and stools from the streets, where people like the doorman, the guy who polished shoes, or even the guy who sold the lottery tickets (illegally) sat. Around every corner you saw these benches, so I started collecting them. I received a grant from the city of Rio for the project.


Karen Marta
And you had a truck.


Marcos Chaves
I had a little truck at the time, yes. It was all part of the work. I filled the truck with brand-new wooden benches—they had to be wooden because I was thinking of the future, that I could come back later and see, one day, that the stools had been personalized, with people carving things into them, and that if a leg was broken, someone would change it.

So I was collecting these stools, but at the same time I started noticing holes in the streets. And this situation had an impact on me, because I couldn't collect the holes. So I started photographing them with an analog camera, from various points of view.


Karen Marta
The first photograph in the book is of one of these holes from 1995.


Marcos Chaves
Yes, I would find them in my neighborhood, Santa Teresa, the old part of Rio up in the mountains. Many of the streets were built on top of former rivers that carried water from the mountains, so of course holes were always forming after a lot of rain. The city tried to fix them, but once it rained again you’d find more holes. For me it was very inconvenient because they showed up on the way to my house, and these holes are very dangerous for cars. So people who lived in that area stuffed things inside of them—sometimes very funny things—because I think somehow they were trying to warn the cars and people about falling into the holes, but at the same time they were warning the authorities that they needed to fix them now.

There’s this sense of humor in putting things inside the holes, and I considered them to be spontaneous sculptures. Because in the end, they were using the principles of sculptures, like balance and gravity, to compose an assemblage.  And so I was very interested in taking pictures of them, and actually I still am today, because the situation keeps repeating. I still see these holes when I go up to the Santa Teresa neighborhood.

When people see this photograph that opens the book, they connect to it immediately, no? And it was funny because it opened a show here, too. The curator picked it. There are many coincidences happening around this book.


Karen Marta
The photographs in the book are from many different cities you’ve spent time in, like Venice, Dubai, and New York, but the perspective that you bring to them is still Rio.


Marcos Chaves
Yes, I was born in Rio. It was my laboratory, where I experimented. So this way of looking at things is inside of me, a part of me. And I am afraid to say that I look for Rio  in every place I go. I was trained by the city here, and it was very important.


Karen Marta
In some ways this also reflects the title It Looked and I Looked Back.


Marcos Chaves
People always ask me, “Where do you find these things?” And I say it's there, every day, in everything. There are so many things in the world, which makes it hard to pay attention, but they are there. Sometimes they call my attention, and that's what I think the title of the book captures, the feeling that these things are looking at me in a certain way, and in looking back I am replying.

I really like the idea that these objects and landscapes are alive, that they have memory and stories. So I look for the hidden souls of these objects. And of course I see things and I have an interpretation of them, but I always leave it very open for other people to experience them in different ways.


Karen Marta
The book situates the images in diptychs, and in these pairings the readers can experience two photographs as a single image. And they can then go on to create their own story or narrative about them.


Marcos Chaves
It is like a little romance, maybe—there were many good pictures that could have been included, but they were not connected in the way that these ones are. The book is certainly a compilation, but in working with diptychs, there is a particular sequence and rhythm there.


Karen Marta
Right, the reader can see these things, which they might have overlooked, in a different way.


Marcos Chaves
Do you know what is looking at me right now, Karen? The book by Daniel Spoerri that you gave me, An Anecdoted Typography of Chance. It’s in a very weird position on my shelf, and it’s looking at me. Spoerri, too, spoke about things as if they were alive, as if they were beings. I'm very thankful that you brought this book to me—it was really the starting point for our conversation about my book.


Karen Marta
For Spoerri, he looked at all the objects that by chance were on his table—like a glass of wine, a paper clip—and then he reorganized them with his friends, a poet and an artist, into an index that reflects how each thing is defined in a different way people who see the world in different terms.


Marcos Chaves
Some artists, like the Surrealists and Dadaists, have fun with objects, and I have a lot of fun. It gives me a lot of joy to work with these things and try to find these connections, putting the individual photographs together in the field or on my computer. I have fun looking for things that can be said with two images, and it’s not working but playing.

I think humor is very important, in my life and my work, because you can say a lot without making a statement, without being so sure about things. By leaving things open, you invite people to think about them. I was talking to a curator in Spain, and he was saying that these photographs I've been taking are somehow very political, because they offer another way to see the world and the order or hierarchy of things. So I think I am saying things with these photographs, but they are not statements.


Karen Marta
And the fact that they can be added to other photographs means they say something to each other. In the book, the order of the photographs is punctuated or separated with orange pages.


Marcos Chaves
Those pages are important because they offer a pause before you start another phase, as in poetry. That was very clever, because there are a lot of pages in the book, and it could get boring.


Karen Marta
Very conventional photo books are often boring because the photographer puts so many pictures in, and sometimes the order is interesting, but it feels a little relentless.


Marcos Chaves
They very much lean into technique. And sometimes, by repeating the same things like they are, they're making a statement of one type of way of looking at things. But in our book, the photographs are diverse, and they’re all over. They’re not depicting the same shadow or the same light or the same crop—no. It’s the content, the subject that is more important than the photograph.


Karen Marta
In the book, there’s the ’95 analog photograph, there are digital photographs, there are iPhone photographs, and all of these techniques are put together. So you don't think about them.


Marcos Chaves
I'm not a purist concerning technique; I don't care. It's not important. The subjects are much more important, and in this case the relationship between the images.


Karen Marta
Right, no one is thinking, well that’s a good photograph, and that's a bad photograph, but that's a better photograph than the other one…


Marcos Chaves
It doesn't matter at all. And I think the process of working on the book together was similar to my process of taking pictures because it was very spontaneous. We worked a lot and went down many paths, but things took us very fluidly to the right way to complete this book.


Karen Marta
And the other thing is, even though you are very different, and I don't think you’ve ever even met in person, you and Garrick Gott, the book’s designer, share a certain sense of humor, a certain lightness toward the world.


Marcos Chaves
It was a very nice meeting of spirits. We see the world in a similar way. I could see already, when I came across the book he designed for José Leonilson, how Garrick could be so sensitive, and make a book that nobody had done before. It's so nice when a person on the other side of the planet can get the spirit of this very special artist. Especially because even though here in Brazil Leonilson is well known, he is associated with the image of a guy who was suffering, with sadness. But he had a great sense of humor and was super funny, he was full of life and gracious, and I can see this in the book.


Karen Marta
Neither Garrick nor I knew about Leonilson before, so our approach to him was totally informed by making the book. He was a great artist, so you would think that you can make a great book on him. And you can, but it was more difficult than it appeared.


Marcos Chaves
You did a wonderful job. In a way we have Leonilson to thank for our meeting.


Karen Marta
You worked in his studio?


Marcos Chaves
Right, I knew him really well. I was going to Sao Paulo, and he was coming to Rio a lot. I had a big studio at the time where we made many works together. Leonilson loved to walk in the city. We would walk Rio, and I would show Rio to him. At the time I was not taking photographs, but we would see things on our walk. He used these symbols in his work, like the volcano, the hurricane, and the islands, and we were looking at them all over the city, on the street and the walls. It was beautiful. I would say that he was a partner in crime in looking at these things in the street—without taking pictures. But in the end I started taking pictures.


Karen Marta
I'm sure he eventually would have taken pictures himself.


Marcos Chaves
He was doing it, but at the time we had those portable cameras, and I have horrible pictures of his that he was taking then. [Laughs] Like me in the beginning!

Karen Marta is editor of the he forthcoming publication Marcos Chaves: It Looked and I Looked Back (KMEC Books).

Brazilian artist Marcos Chaves (born 1961) uses photography, installation, video, texts, and sound to alter the way we view the world around us.