For more than four decades photographer Valdir Cruz has been exploring and documenting the landscape and people of Brazil. As did Gaugin’s famous painting, these photographs pose fundamental questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Exploring and documenting the Brazilian landscape for over 40 years, the photographer Valdir Cruz will present in a solo exhibition in New York a comprehensive view of the power of water and the greatness of nature. The exhibition will take place from May 25 to July 10 at the Consulate-General of Brazil in New York (225 East 41st St). An opening ceremony will be held on May 25 at 6pm.
The magnetic center of Cruz’s work is Brazil’s southern Paraná state, where the vast network of tributaries and waterfalls erases the boundaries between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Especially in Iguaçu, with its gigantic waterfalls, one has the sense of the earth itself in constant motion.
The photographer’s commitment to preservation of this landscape is born of his personal connection to it. He was born in Guarapuava in Paraná state, and his artistic encounter with the water is existential. His waterfalls have a transparent density, like a cloud. These photographs result from decisions based on a feeling for form, a commitment to expand the character of black and white film, and a 
unique capacity to render his intuitions about the natural world by making a representation that has its own forceful presence. The photographs are immersive—evoking a world that is lush, liquid, and material.
Water nurtures his other subject, the trees and forests of Brazil. Cruz has explored important ecological zones, especially in the Serra da Bodaquena region of Mato Grosso do Sul. From his own homeland to the Amazon basin he has seen the battle lines between human exploitation of nature and its preservation. But his fascination with trees reaches to the depth of poetry. Cruz revels in the intricacy of structure, the chaos of forms, the vegetative disorder that is the natural world. He focuses his most attentive gaze on the trunks and roots of the tallest trees. As with the waterfalls, his camera creates a second nature, with extreme viewpoints and an exaggerated sense of towering growth. The instantaneous and the infinitely slow, the microsecond and the gathering of eons that Cruz renders in his two photographic series, ultimately unite in a comprehensive vision of natural process. As an artist and a human being, for Cruz the strongest form of advocacy is to acknowledge the profound reality of the natural world. That encounter is also the place where self-comprehension begins.
Over the past twenty-seven years he has published eleven photography books.