In the Search of the 5th element

Bárbara Wagner has dedicated herself to observing the relationship between manifestations of popular culture, especially music, and access to technologies for the production and circulation of images. Her research into the brega-funk (literally, tacky funk) scene in Recife led to her film Estás vendo coisas (You’re Seeing Things) (2015) and extended with her project about funk in São Paulo Mestres de cerimônias (Masters of Ceremony), which won a Photography Grant from ZUM/IMSin 2015.

Bárbara’s photographs taken during the selection process provide us with an extensive gallery of fame of young people from all sorts of backgrounds, coming from all corners of Brazil. Shown in a ranking, the photographs form an imperfect typology, that shows faces and bodies next to each other, in a range of angles, to the same extent as they are distanced. The diverse backgrounds reflect the four stages of the competition. The white highlights the outline and design of the portraits, while black creates a sense of context and involvement, and those in gray give a mysterious place, as if the subjects were photographed in front of a chromakey.