Sertões

Photography and literature have always been united in the work of Mauren Bisilliat, who seem to gain her maximum point of refinement in this "Sertões: luz & trevas" now reedited for a third time. Bisilliat combines images she took between 1967 and 1972 in northeastern Brazil -in which Ariano Suassuna saw echoes of a "Royal Brazil"- from excerpts from "O Sertões", Euclides da Cunha's classic work. "This third edition in Portuguese published by IMS, which has kept Maureen Bisilliat's photographic collection since 2003, basically follows the original structure (of the first edition), with only a few modifications. Euclides da Cunha's texts were compared with the critical edition of "O Sertões" (Ubu, 2016) which were organized, noted and criticized by professor Walnice Nogueira Galvão. Some photographs were made larger, gaining a double page or extending the margins: two were replaced by similar images: one was excluded. Some pairs of pages had their images reversed, and one, which contained a set of four photographs, was split into two pairs. The sequence and the image-text relationship therefore remain essentially the same. Thirty nine plates used in the first edition were lost: with the exception of two of these images, which were scanned from paper copies, the rest were remade by scanning the book itself, and subsequently treated to make them compatible with the rest of the set. The new digital treatment of all the photos also revealed details that were not seen before." (HKB Translation) --Page 185.