Joaquim Paiva is showing at Ateliê da Imagem / Rio de Janeiro a selection of photographs he made between 2000 and 2010 in hotel rooms he stayed in. Paiva is not only a gifted photographer and curator but also well-known as one of Brazil’s main photo collector. The Joaquim Paiva Collection currently holds  3,300 images from 480  photographers, more than half of which Brazilian. Since 2005 the Brazilian collection has been on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.

Paiva started his collection in the mid-1970s, shortly after he also began his life-long career as a diplomat. He was appointed to posts which included Buenos Aires, Lima, Madrid, Caracas, and San Francisco. He has traveled the world as attaché and as a photographer with his keen eye on his own camera’s viewfinder as well as through the lenses of the many and diverse photographers he has been assembling. “I collect what I like… to me, collecting is participating in a creative process, in the construction of memory and in the development of my country’s visual culture”, he says.

His current exhibition reflects some of those aspects. In his extensive travels, he has collected hotel rooms, from dingy and sterile to classy. The photographs we see shows us those spaces from the viewpoint of someone who is perfectly at ease and comfortable in them. While they expose a familiarity - unmade beds, food from room service, the bedside table, curtains and views from the windows - they also reveal an almost voyeuristic intrusion into someone’s privacy and intimacy. “For me, this show has much more of a character of sensation than one of realism or of documentation”, he wrote. Indeed, through his images hotel rooms cease to be those “non-places” and come to life with feelings, emotions, personality, and memories.

Joaquim Paiva

QUARTOS DE HOTEL
April 6 to June 1, 2019
Ateliê da Imagem
Avenida Pasteur 435
Rio de Janeiro

www.ateliedaimagem.com.br