The Photography of Alair Gomes
Born at Valença, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro in December of 1921, Alair de Oliveira Gomes was a Brazilian photographer whose work fixated on the depiction of the male body. Over the three decades of his photographic career, Gomes produced one hundred-seventy thousand
images, the majority of which still remains unpublished.
During his early career and life, Alair Gomes dealt with an environment where the expression of one’s queer identity was fraught with danger. He often worked in secrecy and faced challenges as a photographer of homoerotic images. In the repressive and strictly controlled political climate that succeeded the 1964 military coup in Brazil, photojournalism focused on exposing the abuses of power perpetrated by the regime, while another significant branch of photography placed its focus on issues of social exclusion and cultural identity. Within the Brazilian heteronormative culture, Alair Gomes was one of very few photographers of the homoerotic tradition.
The son of a civil servant, Alair Gomes spent his formative years in Brazil’s capital, Rio de Janeiro. During his early childhood, he studied the violin and won a local photography competition. At his father’s request, Gomes studied civil engineering and the philosophy of science, that branch of philosophy
that examines the foundations, methods, implications and reliability of science. He graduated with a degree from the National School of Engineering at the University of Brazil in 1944. In the following year, Gomes was appointed as a civil engineer for the Brazilian Railway Company.
In 1946, Gomes collaborated with José Francisco Coelho and other friends to found the literary review MAGOG. He abandoned his profession as an engineer to devote himself to the study of modern physics, mathematics and biology. With a 1961 philosophy grant from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Gomes spent a year in the United States where he, in addition to his studies, associated with New York’s academic and artistic communities. From 1964 to 1976, Gomes participated in numerous international conferences on the philosophy of science.
Gomes began turning to photography in the mid to late 1960s. He traveled to Europe in 1965 for the first time; during this six-month trip, Gomes visited museums and began his photographic career through the use of a borrowed camera. In 1977, Gomes decided to devote himself specifically to
the development of his photographic work, which initially focused almost exclusively on the men at Rio de Janeiro’s beaches.
Alair Gomes created an immense collection of black and white photographs, shot on the beach or through a telephoto lens from his balcony, that were devoted to the beauty and nudity of the male body. These images were reworked and ordered in carefully constructed sequences to form several series of visual compositions. Among these works are “Sonatinas”, the “four feet” series, “Beach Triptychs”, and “A Window in Rio”. Gomes’s most ambitious work, “Symphony of Erotic Icons” (1966-1978), is composed of thousands of images, sometimes shot at unusual angles, that detail slight variations of the nude body. The choreographic sequence of each rhythmic subset is evocative of music scores.
Gomes was a professor of Philosophy of Science at the Biophysics Institute of the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro. He was also a professor of Contemporary Art at the School of Visual Arts for the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. Gomes later
became an advisor at the National Institute of Visual Arts (National Foundation for the Arts, Rio de Janeiro). Between 1976 and 1984, he exhibited his photographs in New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Toronto.
A highly cultured man who was active as a writer, critic and university professor, Alair Gomes was a collector of books, pictures, and films; he had kept copious journals as well as instructive notes on how his photography should be displayed. Gomes died, at the age of seventy-one, from a stabbing at his Rio de Janeiro home by an unknown attacker in August in 1992. Upon his death, Gomes’s entire archive was donated to the National Library of Brazil and the Foundation Cartier pour Art Contemporain in Paris.
In 2001, the Foundation Cartier organized a major monographic exhibition of Alair Gomes’s work, which was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue. Since then, his work has gradually achieved international attention, having featured in the 30th São Paulo Biennial and the Maison Eoropéenne de la Photographie in Paris. Gomes’s photographs are now in the Foundation Cartier in Paris, Madrid’s Loewe Foundation, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown,”Alair Gomes, Rio de Janeiro”, May 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, Ronca Clube Magazine, April 2016
Second Insert Image: Alair Gomes, “A Window in Rio No.120, Opus 2”, Gelatin on Plate, 23.3 x 17.2 cm, Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM Rio
Third Insert Image: Alair Gomes, “Sítio Burle Marx”, “Botãnica” Series, Gelatin Silver Print, 30 x 20 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Alair Gomes, Untitled, Greco-Roman Statue, “Viagens” Series, Collection of Renata Phoenix, Museum of Modern Art