BRASIL

Tracy Breneman-Pennas
I have spent over five years (cumulatively) in Brasil, including:

I am fluent in Portuguese and have worked as a translator, interpreter and language instructor. 

Brasil
    borrowed from http://www.brasil.gov.br/pais/
 
 


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Travel

Translation & Conversions
Chico Buarque's Music and Poetry

Sebastião Salgado's Amazing Photography

...it is not an intellectual analysis of the other that [Salgado] works from. It is from a personal warmth, and an extraordinary reverence for their essential dignity. His approach at least begins, in its respectful empathy, to approximate Martin Buber’s sense of the relationship between I and Thou, where the other momentarily becomes one’s whole world. His point of view is also motivated by the sentimental, populist embrace of a Marxist-influenced economist. “You photograph with all your ideology” is the way Salgado has put it.

His informed empathy and the outsized beauty of so many of his images serve to transcend the common journalistic shorthand that depicts people reductively, according to the degree of their latest victimization. This shorthand also tends to render its subjects anonymous, particularly in the Third World where it takes masses of ultimately interchangeable “victims” for the Western press to pay attention. In the process, people tend to be denuded of their larger, more complicated humanity, including their culture and the internal resources that allow for self-determination. Such a ploy serves to tug momentarily at us in the affluent North until we succumb to “compassion fatigue” and go on to the next grouping of two-dimensional figures to be temporarily featured.

By spending more time with people, Salgado feels, he is able to see their suffering and their strength, which approaches at times a spiritual ascendancy.  [...W]hile recognizing the individual’s singular importance in his images, he is also quick to draw relationship to the universal. “We are all one people--we are probably all one man,” he has asserted. There is, enmeshed in his document of the moment--on Latin American peasants, famine in Africa, or his project on manual workers around the world--a resonating lyric, a sense of the epic, and iconic landscape.  (excerpt from "The Lyric Documentarian" by  Fred Ritchin online at  http://www.terra.com.br/sebastiaosalgado/)


Misc.
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E-mail: brenemanpennas@gmail.com

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