His work has been featured in collective exhibitions at São Paulo, Buenos Aires, London, Berlin, Los Angeles and Tokyo. In august 2012, he founded the independent publisher Savant, which produces and distributes artists’ books and zines.
He
is a member of Companhia Rapadura, a photography collective composed
of young brazilian photographers. The group was gathered through the
interest of its members on the act of photographing, which happens in
an unpretentious manner, avoiding traditional standards of the
professional environment.
Silvino
currently lives and works in BrasÃlia, where he promotes the events
(Photo)Book Club and Sacolão – Sale and Exchange of Photographs.
Since
the apparition of the smartphone, the self-representation has never
been so common. The devices are evolving every year to get the most
efficient in terms of photography, and practical in terms of self
representation. Now, we all have a front camera in our cell-phone and
most of the aficionados of the selfie has got themselves a
selfie-stick for sure.
The selfie is an (r)evolution of the
self-portrait and what makes it different from the classic genre -
that exists since the very first years of the discovery of
Photography - is that it is intrinsically linked to its device and
its IT ubiquity. Generally a digital camera, a smartphone, a
laptop or a tablet are the tools used to get a selfie, it has to be
able to be instantly shared in the social networks. The selfie
testifies the presence of the person(s) represented in a specific
place or in a specific moment and the photographer is almost always
the subject photographed. More than a self-questioning by the image,
it became a communication tool and an ubiquitous social recognition
on the internet.
As
a movement, the selfie is forging its specific codes and this is what
the book VestÃgios digitais (Digital Traces) by Silvino
Mendonça is about: a typology of the selfie.
A
few years ago, Silvino discovered the pictures of unknowns in a
smartphone's showroom. From
then, he started looking for more similar images and began to collect
numerous selfies by capturing them with his own smartphone: a
smartphone's camera photographs another smartphone's camera which
displays a selfie. Besides recognizing a similarity of the poses, the
pictures raises questions about the
reasons that push people to take these pictures and to left
them behind. Among the poses we recognize as a selfie characteristic:
the duck face
the ugly face
the groupie or group selfie
the helfie (selfie of your hair)
The
smartphone has become the new photo booth which the surrealist André
Breton used to described as a “ system of psychoanalysis by the
imageâ€, and it doesn't matter how many pictures you take, “none
of these visions will match the one you would like to get from
yourselfâ€. Indeed, in a world of massive share and access from the
others of personal data, the relationship we have with our own image
has become schizophrenic. At the same time that people upload selfies
on the web almost every day, the notion of personal data as a money
change has never been so present and the boundary between public and
private has become more thinner than before. Therefore,
it is more and more difficult to take a random portrait without
signing a term of use; hard times for the photographers.
