Camila Tuon’s portraits create an emotional connection with Brazil’s identity and oral memory
Referencing the American literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Brazilian poet, essayist and playwright Leda Maria Martins emphasises that the Africans who crossed the Middle Passage did not travel and suffer alone. For her, with our ancestors came their divinities, their diverse ways of viewing the world, their linguistic, artistic, ethnic, technical, religious and cultural alterity, their different forms of social organisation and symbolisation of reality. Using the body itself as a central form of expression, it was through interaction and a making-feeling that black people created possible strategies for managing the self. In this way, they manipulated the precarious structures of their captive architecture to affirm their identity and their condition as subjects. These files and repertoires of oral memory have unfolded over multiple generations.
This interwoven history speaks deeply to Camila Tuon. As a hostage of a process of political erasure in Brazil, the photographer doesn’t have many memories of her own upbringing and doesn’t know for sure the origin of her mother's family. Mainly due to the frustration caused by the epistemicide, Tuon chose documentation through photography to affirm herself. “Visual memory for me is something very valuable, it is due to the trauma of the absence of this in my childhood that I take photographs today,” she says.
“The act of making a portrait forces me to communicate and break down internal barriers”
Tuon says she was born in a "city without much identity close to São Paulo" and at the age of 20, she began to move to the urban centre and use her mobile phone to photograph the novelties she saw on the train journey along the way. It was people who caught her attention the most and awoke something curious, affectionate or familiar in her.
Since then, she has been drawn to portraiture. The philosopher Sueli Carneiro and the singers Tássia Reis, Giovani Cidreira and Nego Bala are among the people she has shot. Some of them have also become her close friends. "Portraying someone for me is intimacy, that is, having the privilege of valuable exchanges and the responsibility of carrying forward something genuine. On the other hand, my work helps me to evolve, as I am a shy and introspective person. The act of making a portrait forces me to communicate and break down internal barriers.”
Now the photographer, alongside her partner Gabriela de Paula, also has a company called CeGê, which proposes a fresh movement for the audio-visual scene in Brazil based on building new memories for black people. With the music video ‘Dóllar Euro’ by Tassia Reis and Monna Brutal, CeGê recently won the award for Best Brazilian music video at the Brazilian MVF awards.
Whether working as a creative producer with de Paula, or in her solo work, it’s her ongoing exploration and understanding of our country’s identity where Tuon finds her strength. These main references, semiotic constructions and intellectual productions are what give her images such evocative and tender emotion.
Words Ode
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From Brazil, With Love And Optic Games is a Nataal series spearheaded by Ode, a São Paulo-based stylist, writer and independent curator. Brazil, which has the largest black population outside the African continent, is home to a new generation of young black photographers who are creating fresh perspectives on fashion and art. This series of interviews sees Ode explore how their work both expands ideas around representation and participation and challenges Western perspectives that ignore the Global South as part of black life and diasporic conversations
Read our other stories in this series here.
Published on 01/04/2021