TITLE: His own paths

“Photography has broadened the vision of the masses” in the accurate opinion of the French-German photographer and historian Gisèle Freund, and became the most powerful and widespread instrument of description and plastic interpretation of the visible world. As soon as the cameras became lighter, a new character emerged, one who walks around with an attentive eye, capturing moments. In the European tradition, he is known as the flâneur/photographer, a little romantic, combining rigor and wonder. On the North American side, the street photographer addressed urban culture in an incisive and forceful manner, thus building a model reproduced all around the world.
Mário Baptista drank from this fountain, but he makes his own path that goes beyond the simple record of an interesting occurrence. In his work, subjectivity seems to be accessed by a visible-world detail, as if an invisible channel connected the focused scene to the photographer's core. With a perfect mastery of technique and, above all, of color, his look unearths, reconstructs and provokes plastic epiphanies.
When wandering through the streets, Mário Baptista follows his own paths.
Milton Guran

AUTHOR: Mario Baptista (Brazil)

A restless observer of human landscapes, he dives through the record in search of himself and the other through the look.
At one extreme, his agitated gaze captures half-sleeping metropolises, lit by almost supernatural beams of light. In the other, the light he registers is from the soul, from the eyes, from the human in its most essential condition - a work that derives from involvement with volunteering and that comes to us without sensationalism, although it brings yet another light, this one of more difficult digestion: the red alert on the society we are creating.
Regarding this photographic look that he has exercised since his youth, Baptista says that in his career he researched different styles to guide his artistic language.
Based on references from street photographers, little by little and always in front of the cameras, he was shaping his perception of the urban and human landscape of the capital of São Paulo, which is a recurring theme in his photos. Today, with a more refined look, he claims that he does not change the essence of what happens on the scene, preferring to act as if he were spying through a lock. “I seek to record what I think about life in the other and I seek the other in myself, establishing a connection. At the moment of the click, it’s restlessness versus reflection,” he says. A self-confessed fan of black and white compositions, he claims that he draws with shadow and not with light, and for him, the latter is poetry that becomes a tool for sculpting the city.