A Portrait of Disease, An Experience at Kalafong Hospital
DAVID GOLDBLATT, 2000
The physician, Miguel Ribeiro, has dared to find beauty where other practitioners have been concerned only to objectify the subjects of their clinical and forensic studies, and where ordinary folk are wont to avert their eyes from fear or even disgust.
He has done this without fudging but indeed by precisely applying the understanding afforded him by his profession.Nor has he falsely dramatised or indulged in sentimentality. In the result he has produced photographs of pathologies of the human condition which are remarkable for the depth of the paradoxes they pose.Somehow the scientific is not obscured by or sacrificed to the aesthetic, yet the clarity of both, seemingly, is heightened.And far from beauty concealing or minimising what is suffered, it seems to make the condition suffered both real and immediate.Science and art, the beautiful and the terrible are here brought into rare and moving contiguity
-David Goldblatt
"I bought my first camera in 1978, and from the very beginning would occasionally incorporate a hand or other body part in photos of landscapes. Yet it was only in 1985, while living in South Africa (1980-91), that I first used my body as the central subject of photographs in a systematic way. The appeal of this theme, however, lasted no longer than eight or nine months, overshadowed by my passion at the time for medical photography."
-Miguel Ribeiro
PREFACE OF CATALOGS
A Portrait of Disease, An Experience at Kalafong Hospital
DAVID GOLDBLATT, 2000
The physician, Miguel Ribeiro, has dared to find beauty where other practitioners have been concerned only to objectify the subjects of their clinical and forensic studies, and where ordinary folk are wont to avert their eyes from fear or even disgust.
A True Ghost
FRANCISCO JOSE VIEGAS, 2006
When the body, or a suggestion of it, is mentioned in art or in daily life (in fact the two are often separated by intangible barriers), we think of a universe stirring within the borders and the ways of eroticism.
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Multiple Body
CLARA FERREIRA ALVES, 2010 APRIL
This body is whatever we wish to see in it. It can be a landscape. It can be an object, a building. It can be the moonlit desert. A ship’s rigging. A triumphant arch. It can be a square, a circle, a straight line.
Abstract Body
MIGUEL RIBEIRO, 2010, MAY
This is a group of photographs of my body taken between the years 2001 and 2008, the period I was involved with this subject. I bought my first camera in 1978, and from the very beginning would occasionally incorporate a hand or other body part in photos of landscapes.