Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1356-9325 (Print) 1469-9575 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

Mirror, A Hollow In The Wall. Your Portrait, A

Hollow In The Wall. Ana Cristina Cesar: Poetry And
Photography

Natalia Brizuela

To cite this article: Natalia Brizuela (2007) Mirror,�A�Hollow In�The�Wall.�Your�Portrait,�A�Hollow�In

The�Wall. Ana Cristina Cesar: Poetry And Photography, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies,
16:1, 27-44, DOI: 10.1080/13569320601156746

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569320601156746

Published online: 13 Mar 2007.

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Natalia Brizuela

MIRROR, A HOLLOW1 IN THE WALL. YOUR

PORTRAIT, A HOLLOW IN THE WALL.
ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND
PHOTOGRAPHY

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.2

Even the most recent edition of Ana Cristina Cesar’s work – a Spanish-language
translation, Album de retazos, published in Argentina in July 2006 – includes, alongside
the poems (as its title, in this case, might suggest) a photographic album with portraits
of the Brazilian poet. Yet the title of the Spanish version does not in fact refer to the
photographs that it includes – it is not a photographic album, no, but rather an album
of snippets, of remnants, of remains, of leftovers – but is taken, as the editors explain,
from the title of one of the collections of unedited poems left by Ana Cristina (housed
now in the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro), itself thus a remnant, as the
editors say, ‘an album forever unfinished that collects texts and snippets of texts made,
in turn, of snippets of others’.3 An album: ‘from the Latin “albus”, “white”, used as a
noun meaning a blank tablet’.4 The central figure is the album, not the snippets, the
splinters, the pieces, for how, Ana Cristina’s poems repeatedly ask, does one both fill
the blank tablet and at the same time leave it blank? I will fill the album, her poetics
seem to suggest, but by filling it I will in fact be leaving it empty. To explore this
paradox is the purpose of this essay.

Photography and autobiography or, on the writing of the

I/eye

In the late 1970s Ana Cristina Cesar, a young aspiring writer and student of literature
and media in Rio de Janeiro, begins to explore, through visual experiments – shooting
portraits of herself, transforming clips from magazines and postcards into ready-mades,
using pictographic writing – a new material and methodology for her incipient poetic
practice. As Ana Cristina becomes in just a couple of years a central figure in the
Brazilian poetic avant-garde of that era, her writing is marked, as many critics have
emphasized, by forms and figures of the autobiographical. From the first small
independent editions of Cenas de abril (‘April Scenes’), Correspondência completa
(‘Complete Correspondence’) and Luvas de pelica (‘Leather Gloves’) between 1979 and
1980, to the 1982 book that would place Ana Cristina Cesar at the heart of the Brazilian
poetic avant-garde, A teus pés (‘At your feet’), it is the intersection of autobiography and

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 March 2007, pp. 27-44
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569320601156746
28 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

these visual experiments – and in particular photography – that provides the way to
read the oeuvre.
If on the one hand, the poetic I articulated throughout her work will play with
forms of intimacy, with ‘truth’ and with autobiography, on the other hand, beginning
with its emergence in Cenas de Abril – a collection which takes the form of a diary – it
will also lay out a repudiation of truth, of reality of its uniqueness: ‘I no longer want the
rage of truth’, the I of ‘21 de fevereiro’ (February 21’) would state (‘Não quero mais a
fúria da verdade’).5 Yet if her poetry will seek to work with ‘autobiographical’ forms of
intimate writing and, at the same time, undermine not only referentiality and the
possibility of a unique subject but also ‘truth’, the question then becomes how to
navigate – but not resolve – in the praxis of writing, such a paradox. How, in other
words, could some forms be resignified? By searching for and insisting upon, the poems
seem to suggest, exits from truth. Ways out of the truth of narration of the I, for
example, by ‘dividing the body into heteronyms’ (‘dividir o corpo em heterônimos’).6
Or, as the same poetic I would indicate in ‘21 de fevereiro’, by searching for the truth
as though it were something to be purchased, consumed, chosen among merchandise:
‘I search the [shop] window for a brutal style’ (‘procuro na vitrina um modelo
brutal’).7 It is in this same sense that the photographic portraits in particular – as
staging and visualization of an I, divided up into heteronyms, displayed as an alluring
object of desire – and the visual experimentations more generally, would provide Ana
Cristina with a laboratory. As such, they would allow her to give shape to this central
paradox of her poetic corpus.

Photography is not a document8

It is odd, although certainly not coincidental, that during the 1970s, when photography
became a new object of theoretical inquiry – with the publication of the classic works
of Susan Sontag and later Roland Barthes, among others9 – and the photograph the
materiality for novel conceptual explorations in the field of art practice, the critical
study of autobiography also experienced something of an apogee in the works of Philipe
Lejeune and in Paul de Man’s brief but incisive essay. Transparent referentiality, direct
representation, the transmission of an inescapable truth, the mirror-like and mimetic
quality of both graphies – photography and autobiography – were not merely
questioned and scrutinized but left in ruins, and what emerged from these and other
studies was, among other things, a closer scrutiny of the rhetorical strategies of each
medium. From the 1980s onwards, photography and autobiography could no longer be
thought of as documents, but rather as sketches of and investigations into desire.
If photography, as Barthes would state, is the advent of the I as other, and the I is
constituted in the photographic portrait by the pose, then the apparent transparency of
that modality of representation – that from its beginning had seduced with the precision
of its mode of reproduction of everything that the photographic device would fix – is
both disarticulated and problematized. Photographic referentiality and the very power of
photography as a medium would instead reside for Barthes in that which cannot be seen
in the photograph, in what he will designate as the punctum. The punctum: that which the
observer adds to a photograph, yet which is already there, secretly waiting for external
revelation10: a certain effect, the personal and the private, the secret. Or, as
 ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 29

photographer Diane Arbus would express in a 1971 interview, ‘a photograph is a secret

about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know’. Photography’s secret revelation
emerges, for Barthes, not in the moment of observation, but rather precisely when the
photograph is no longer seen, when it is not looked upon. In that instant, the punctum
appears. Not singular, but dual: the punctum-as-effect and the punctum-as-time.
In the critical texts treating autobiography – and in particular in de Man’s essay – it is
clear that a series of fissures in how the subject could be thought of and in its self-
representation were now unavoidable.11 Yet it is also clear in these studies that certain
writing practices – analogous to the rhetoric and practice of photography – were
simultaneously obliterating the object, the theme, and that these were instead constituted
by an absence. The word, thus detached from its referentiality, could devote itself to the
degree zero; and the mise-en-scène of that absence took on a particularly and paradoxically
interesting dimension in the writing of an autobiographical I. ‘We assume’, reads one of
the famous sentences of de Man’s essay, ‘that life produces the autobiography as an act
produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the
autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the
writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus
determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?’.12 The autobiographical
figure par excellence, de Man will argue, is prosopopoeia, the fiction of a voice that comes
from beyond death, the fiction of a presence in absence or, to trace its etymology, to endow
with a mask or a face. For de Man, then, autobiography would be, by means of proso-
popoeia, the act of figuration and de-facement, of giving and taking off a mask. Perhaps
the photographic punctum is nothing but visual prosopopoeia, the mise-en-scène of a figure, of
a face that arrives from another world – beyond the photograph – and touches us.

Snapshots

‘I felt like changing my approach or façade; I bought makeup, got hold of French
perfume, but the high boots crush my feet’, Ana Cristina would write to her friend Ana
Candida in a letter from 1979. (‘Me deram ganas de mudar o approach e a fachada,
comprei maquiagem, ganhei perfume francês, mas as altas botas me machucam os
pés’).13 In another letter, this one from 1980, she would complain about the city of
Portsmouth where she had just moved and about her new house there, where ‘not even
the scenery has glamour’ (‘nem a cenografia tem glamour’).14 This urge seems to be
the key element to deciphering two photographic portraits contemporaneous with this
correspondence – the period of the young poet’s residence in Europe, while she
completed her graduate work in translation in England – thereby suggesting that in
them Ana Cristina changes her façade, constituting scenes of glamour, visualizations of
her desire for change. In both photographs she appears lying down on a bed, in dresses
from another era. In one photograph she is sitting, reclining against the wall in a dark
dress; black lace covers her shoulders. In another, she is lying down on the bed –
a detail on the pillow suggests that it is probably within the same space as the other,
on the same bed – wearing another dress, this time a pale one. The same hairstyle,
the same makeup, the same body, the same scene, but different stagings, different
figurations, or defacements, of the subject: Ana Cristina poses. Changing the façade,
getting dressed, disguising oneself, living on a stage: constructing characters.
30 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

One of these photographs has a number of similarities to Henry Matisse’s

1924 – 1925 painting, ‘Odalisque a la culotte rouge’, which Ana Cristina will send in
a postcard to another friend, Cecilia Londres, in 1980. Placing the image of one
woman next to the image of the other, it is not only the illusory similarity between
painting and photography that emerges but also the difficulty of designating an
original. The painting, a representation of a fantasy; the photograph, the reproduction
of a painting representing a fantasy: in breaking the illusion in this way, the citational
character of Ana Cristina’s portrait points towards the mise-en-abyme and the role of
fantasy within these, and within all, photographic portraits. It is obviously important
to remember here that Matisse’s painting is also citing Edouard Manet’s 1863
‘Olympia’, the painting that for many critics inaugurates the modality of modern
art.15 In this way, Ana Cristina’s choice of the postcard – along with her own work
citing that painting – will thus construct itself on the basis of the gesture that
Georges Bataille, in his essay on Manet, will consider characteristic of modern
painting: the obliteration of the object, the distancing from the ‘language that refers’,
‘the strange impression of an absence’.16
In both photographic portraits – in reality, in almost all of Ana Cristina’s
photographic portraits – she looks back, returning the gaze to the camera eye, to the
eye of the shutter release, of the spectator. In both portraits – and again, as in nearly all
of her photographic portraits – Ana Cristina poses as an other, constituting, through
that pose, a character. Perhaps, why not, a heteronym. The returned gaze in these
portraits serves as an anchor, by forging a link, a sort of pact between the gaze of the
woman and that of the observer. But this anchoring does not take place in a particular
subject, but rather an I of pure re-presentation. Perhaps the portraits indicate that it is
as a heteronym, as an I-already-other, that this I will be able to return the gaze; to
forge, with the gaze, a pact of recognition. To a great extent because recognition is no
longer necessary. The eye is not the I.
In other photographs, prior to the ‘odalisques’, taken during 1976, Ana Cristina
poses on an armchair, much like a film actress or model, wearing a shirt with horizontal
stripes and a huge pair of sunglasses. Perhaps what indicates most concretely the
cinematographic-posed-actorly aspect of these photographs is not, as in the images
from 1980, the change of ‘façade’, the makeup and the scenario, but rather other visual
configurations. On one hand, the portraits clearly form part of a series in which, as in a
photo shoot with a model or actress, there is a search for the right gesture and pose, for
the framing from which the star will emerge, a search for the glamour necessary to
achieve a magazine cover, an image for the poster. That image whose singularity
resides in its capacity to be a mirror for the fantasy of many – not only the star but also
each of those who identifies herself with that image, is within the photo; that is, one
image/woman-who-is-many. On the other hand, in all of the photographs of the series,
within this obviously interior space, Ana Cristina wears huge, ostentatious dark glasses,
in an excessively theatrical gesture. Glasses, which are in part a citation of publicity
photographs, photos of famous people, but which also cover her face and, more
specifically, her eyes. Glasses that appear to underscore what could be understood
as a crucial impulse within Ana Cristina’s literary project: you will think you see me,
but you won’t see me. I will not show you my eye/I. Not to hide, behind the glasses,
poses and citations, the real, but rather to propel, with a certain ludic violence, the
flight of the other’s gaze. That gaze that would want to ‘anchor the ship in space’
 ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 31

(‘ancorar o navio no espaço’). In this way, upon fleeing from the you – the one who
observes, reads, asks; the interlocutor, the gaze – the I gains the freedom to disperse.
Because that which is exterior – the call of the other, the external voice and gaze,
the you, a certain extimacy, as Florencia Garramuño would define this exteriority at the
very heart of intimacy in Ana Cristina’s poetry17 – shapes and subjects the poetic I.
The you which the I will respond to in texts such as those in Correspondência completa, or
with which it will constantly engage in dialogue in the simulated diaries of Luvas de
Pelica. Or the you that is nothing more than the unfolding of the I – ‘And the other
one, who is me, / doesn’t want to know anything more / about the mirror before her’
in A teus pés (‘e mais não quer saber / a outra, que sou eu, / do espelho em frente’);18
which, in one of her last unpublished texts written days before her death, would be
stated as ‘Iyou’ (‘Euvocê’). It is also in this sense that, right before this photographic
series, Ana Cristina complains in a letter of the I’s different figurations – of the I as
many – that a certain daily existence at home would demand of her: ‘I switch to
professor, girl, student, pretty intellectual, ugly passenger on the bus, granddaughter,
“journalist”, poet, sister, desiring woman, frustrated woman, correspondent, all in
a single day’ (‘I switch para professora, filha, aluna, bela intelectual, feia passageira
de ônibus, neta, “jornalista”, poeta, irmã, mulher desejante, mulher frustrada,
correspondente . . . tudo num dia só’).19 The you, therefore, as external, but at the
same time Ana Cristina’s poetics will work upon the I as an exteriority of itself: in that
‘I wish I could split my body into heteronyms’,20 in that voice of the I that will answer
to and enter into dialogue with itself from one poem to the next, as Flora Süssekind
points out,21 or, as this reading would have it, in that I which is another of photography.
It is interesting that the complaints in the letter from 1977 – ‘life is asking me to
be many’ – and from 1980 – ‘I want to be others’ – seem to cancel each other out in
the contradiction that they trace. The difference in that relationship to decentring –
the external request for multiplicity, the internal desire to unfold into many – which in
some moments emerges as the weight of obligation and in others as the search for a
necessity, would seem to be set out by the distance between an I that is invented,
created as a purely theatrical character, and an I that is a response to the call of
the other. It is the letter I not will search, precisely, for a way of arriving at that I-en-
abyme, at that ‘Autobiography. No, biography. / Woman’ (‘Autobiografia. Não,
biografia. / Mulher’)22 that we read in the first lines of A teus pés.
It is in this same period – during the late 1970s and early 1980s – that Ana
Cristina would begin in her translation exercises, in the daily life of correspondence and
in her diary, as well as the works in which she would exchange written language for
visual language, exercising ‘pictography’ – through the ludic appropriation of post-
cards, magazine clippings, and photographic portraits as ready-mades – a search for a
methodology characterised by a ‘constant voluntary exile’23 from the poetic form and
materiality. And it is, as has been suggested, within this voluntary exile from poetry
as method for poetic composition that we should situate Ana Cristina’s use of
photography. Photography will function as rehearsal24 – and materialization – of that
‘Iyou’, of that ‘Autobiography. No, biography’, of that need to change the façade. This
is because the photographic portrait inaugurates a new modality of the I as other: the
photographic portrait is ‘the other which is I’ (‘a outra que sou eu’). Perhaps it is not a
coincidence, then, that these photographs of Ana Cristina – taken between 1976 and
1983 – visualize an exile of or from the I, strangely materialized in precisely that device
32 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

that would appear, always, ‘to anchor . . . in space’, given that undoubtedly referential
character of the photograph. And the portraits do this by making evident that which
is true of all photography: its theatrical character, of mise-en-scène, of fabrication, of
conception of figures-en-abyme, of clippings of life, of extraction, of intent to give a
form to desire. A practice with respect to the subject itself, never as autobiography but
rather as biography, although always as an ‘imaginary biography, in fragments’
(‘biografia imaginária, em fragmentos’).25
The displacement and loss with which Ana Cristina’s first collection of poetry
opens – ‘it is always more difficult / to anchor a ship in space’ (‘é sempre mais difı́cil
/ ancorar um navio no espaço’) – would thus appear to be in tune with the practice
of the photographic pose, with the close relationship, as the poet would indicate in
some of her correspondence from the period, to the search for and need of ‘inventing
everyday things/spaces/situations’ in order not to remain anchored or fixed; and, in
this way, constantly shying away from a ‘total I’. In its place, the practice of the
errancy and drift of exile. Because the photographic portrait is always ‘a still’, that
fixity becomes, in its materialization of the I as other, the key to errancy, to
movement.
It would be, then, a question of beginning a double observation. On one hand, as
we have been doing, understanding the practice of the photographic pose as a method,
by way of a rehearsal of and for writing: photography as rehearsal and as materialization
of the ‘art of conversation’ that would articulate the diction in Ana Cristina’s poetry.26
Yet on the other hand we should notice the use of portraits of the poet in the
posthumous editions of her work: portraits included as part of an editorial project that
would appear to distance itself radically from certain editorial impulses in the 1970s in
Brazil – handmade, independent editions, with a limited circulation, practically
distributed door to door – within whose parameters Ana Cristina Cesar published her
first three books. ‘Spread the word’, Ana Cristina would write to Cecilia Fonseca from
England, in a postcard from 1980, ‘that I’m printing my new “novel”, called “Leather
gloves”. I’m doing it all: graphics, cover, paper’ (‘Divulga por aı́ que estou imprimindo
meu ‘romance’ novo que se chama “Luvas de Pelica”. Estou fazendo tudo, projeto
gráfico, capa, papel’).27 As Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda had already pointed out in 1976
in the Prologue to the famous 26 poetas hoje (‘26 poets today’), these editions would
bring with them ‘the novelty of a subversion of the traditional patterns of production,
edition, and distribution of literature’ (‘a novidade de uma subversão dos padrões
tradicionais de produção, edição e distribuição de literatura’28), which would establish,
especially in the 1970s and early ’80s, a proximity between author and reader. This
would impose the demand of a complicity that the poem should offer up. ‘If the author is
there, in front of us, it is not the poem that we should ask to corroborate its identity.
Now what has begun to be demanded of poems is complicity’ (‘Se o autor está logo ali,
na nossa frente, não é ao poema que se deve pedir comprovante de identidade. Agora o
que se passa a exigir dos poemas é cumplicidade’).29 The reader expects and is given that
complicity in the poetic form of the day-to-day, the intimate – the diary, the
correspondence, at times copied by hand, adding to that proximity with the very body of
the poet who circulates, a kind of travelling salesman of his or her strange, handmade
books – which poetry would take on after 1964 in Brazil. Yet, in Ana Cristina’s poetry,
the complicity would ultimately be, as Flora Süssekind has pointed out, only a postcard
– ‘intimacy is only a postcard’ (‘a intimidade é apenas um cartão-postal’).30 Mass
 ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 33

produced, never singular, feigning intimacy – here, see where I have been and am, but
even more, here, see with me; be here/there with me – in an attempt to bridge
distance and the passing of time, the postcard also hides its truth as an object of
consumption. The postcard’s intimacy could thus be thought of as nothing other than the
ironic intimacy of the modern. The posthumous editions would reconfigure this ironic
intimacy at the heart of Ana Cristina’s poetry and methodology through their insertion
of albums of photographic portraits of the poet as ‘iconographic scripts’ (‘roteiros
iconográficos’)31 to cut across the writing, closing off – or attempting to – with
photographs, the I; assuring, in this way, the possibility of autobiographical
transparency.32

Without a marked position . . . delirious speech33

Barely two years after her death in 1985, the first posthumous work of Ana Cristina
César, Inéditos e dispersos. Poesia/Prosa, introduces – in the section of writings from the
period from 1982 to 1983 – an album of photos of the poet. The editorial gesture,
evidently, seems to want to establish an analogy between the portraits of the poet and
her literary work, between the writer and her writing, a symmetry, that is, between
life and work. The editorial inscription of Ana Cristina’s poetry as autobiography – and
from that the photography functioning as material medium – is surprising, given that
her poetic work would constantly mine and undermine all referentiality, precisely by
utilizing intimate forms that would seem to point to referentiality: colloquial language,
the inclusion of the proper name, epistolary writing and the diary form. As Flora
Süssekind would point out, in Ana Cristina’s poetry the subject of the texts is defined
as voice: ‘as a collage of speech, a succession of tones, rhythms, conversations’
(‘como colagem de falas, sucessão de tons, ritmos, conversas’), and not ‘strictly as a
character, self-portrait . . . or figure with masks and fixed outlines’ (‘propriamente
como personagem, auto-retrato . . . ou figura com máscaras ou contornos fixos’).34
‘Intimacy’, the poetic I would announce in a poem from A teus pés, ‘was theater’
(‘A intimidade era teatro’).35
Already in 1985 Inéditos e dispersos establishes a series of visual problematics for the
future posthumous editions of Ana Cristina Cesar’s writing because the inclusion of
photographs would rapidly become a trope in publications of the poet’s work after her
sudden death in 1983. That editorial gesture would be repeated, along with the
same photographs, in edition after edition, from then on. Interestingly, as in Inéditos
e dispersos, the majority of the photographic portraits of the poet dating from the mid-
1970s included in these later publishings – Inéditos e dispersos in 1985; Escritos da
Inglaterra in 1988; the front and back covers of Escritos no Rio in 1993; A teus pés in 1998;
Correspondência Incompleta in 1999 – show an Ana Cristina whose eyes are covered by
glasses. In this way already in the later half of the 1970s her eyes (we might say) can no
longer be seen. It is as if a barrier or filter were established, in order to mediate the
ocular experience of the world. On one hand, to darken, to protect, to not allow light
to pass through; on the other hand, to see with more clarity – a pendulum that would
oscillate between clarity and obscurity, between covering up and uncovering: the
world as well as the poet. This moment of ocular occlusion is also the beginning of Ana
Cristina Cesar’s poetic production.
34 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

Evidently, we could think of the inclusion of the photographs not in contradiction

to Ana Cristina’s poetics but rather as a surprising critical articulation at the very heart
of those posthumous editorial projects for which the photos would thus be the
visualization of the fragmentary, repetitive and citational character, of Ana Cristina’s
poetry. In this way, the editorial decision would not be that of an insistence in the
autobiographical character of Ana Cristina’s writings. Rather, it would constitute a
wink, on one hand, at the game-en-abyme that photography – a mechanism whose
ontological roots would be the simulacrum, in spite of, and along with, its
phenomenological referentiality – would allow us to read in her poetry; and, on the
other hand, the recognition that the poetic diction of her work would be constituted
from a conception of autobiography as defacement.
However, the fact that the photo album included in Inéditos e dispersos traces, in its
organization, a life in absolute and progressive fashion, beginning in infancy and from
there positing a straight and chronological line until 1983, the year of the poet’s death,
restricts the possibility of a reading in which the appearance of photography in the
posthumous editions would be a critical reinforcement of Ana Cristina’s own poetic
method. A double surprise, then: in the first place, a surprise at the very inclusion of
the photographs would be heightened, in the second place, by the organization of the
visual material, given that from the moment in which the album appears, and in spite of
the fact that the unpublished texts have been organized, like the photographs,
chronologically, the reader has already come across poems such as ‘Mancha’ (‘Stain’).
Here, the poetic I starts off describing itself – I’m 16 years old, I’m a widow, with
unruly hair – only to rapidly affirm, ‘Poetry is a lie’ (‘A poesı́a é uma mentira’).36
If poetry lies, then photography as a document – as the editorial gesture would seem
to indicate – offers the inescapable truth.
The album of Inéditos e dispersos begins, according to the strict visual chronology,
with a baby girl: alongside the first portrait, in which the baby, her face to the side,
looks off into the distance, a photo taken from an elevated perspective in which the
girl, whose face does not appear, is crawling on the floor, surrounded by books which
spill out around her. The following photo, still on the same page, reveals the girl, now
a bit older – her longer hair suggests the passage of time – absorbed with paper and
pencil, her face hidden in this image as well. The last photograph on the first page of the
album shows her gazing directly at the camera, at the person behind the photographic
lens. With one hand the girl holds a doll, while the other is extended out towards the
camera, a finger pointing, indicating, or perhaps attempting to touch that which
occupies the point of view: the camera, the photographer – the observer. In this last
photograph, the girl would seem to be in dialogue with that which is outside of herself,
trying to approach, to bring herself closer to that other. What is surprising about the
album is not the care taken to stage the chronological progression of an I – visualizing
in this way the desire for order and the classical narrative of an I, tracing a concen-
tration, attempting in this way to naturalize the constructive, fictional and montage
aspect of any album – nor the symmetry between life and work that the very inclusion
of the photos would set out. Rather, it is that on that first page, the inscription of
an ‘origin’, of a ‘natural’ order is rendered visible, the figuration of a future subject
already traced out. Because it cannot be coincidental that already in the album’s first
photographs what is revealed is a series of characteristics of both the adult Ana Cristina
and of the poet. Her relationship to words, to literature, to drawing – ‘in my room I
 ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 35

invent a literary day-to-day’ (‘no meu quarto invento um cotidiano literário’), she
would write, almost in a sort of echo of these photographs, in a letter years later. Or
her search for a contact-interlocution with a you, one of the key poetic methods of
her compositions – ‘(I whisper): Iyou’ (‘[Sussuro:] Euvocê’), the poetic I of ‘Eleven
hours’ (‘Onze horas’) states; ‘the interlocutor is fundamental. I write for you yes’
(‘o interlocutor é fundamental. Escrevo para você sim’),37 she would write in an
unpublished fragment days before her death. Or as rejection, as the other side of
the same need, in that tense relationship between subjectivization and desire, the
enunciation would become, as in Luvas de pelica, ‘I want you to get out of here’
(‘Eu quero que você saia daqui’).38 Yet, in the face of the drift of the poetic subject, of
the delirious (desvairada) enunciation of an I – whether in the poetic texts or in the
correspondence – an imposition, with the photographic chronology, of that image of
life, organizing the dispersion: to trace a destiny, to tie it there, to ‘anchor’ it.
It is perhaps in this sense that, once the album’s photographs are examined
attentively, and once the very short introduction by the edition’s coordinator,
Armando Freitas Filho, has been read, not only the eagerness to render the text
progressive but also the very inclusion of the photographs does not draw our attention.
For, according to the introduction, Ana Cristina’s sudden death left all that was related
to her and, first and foremost, the sentiments directed towards her, ‘in suspense’,
‘undefined’, ‘interrupted in a void’: ‘incomplete sensations’ (‘suspenso’, ‘indefini-
do[s]’, ‘interrompidos no vazio’: ‘[sensações] incompletas’). Considered from the
perspective of this series of adjectives it would become even more clear that the
photographs would attempt, we might suppose, to re-establish a logic, to include a
logic of the poet’s life – a method to ‘continue’, ‘define’, ‘complete’, and as such
reverse that which the editor had indicated in his introduction. A progression laid out
through this mechanism of writing that is photography: this type of graphy that literally
inscribes a remnant and on index of that which is photographed, for the privileged
place of photography in modern culture would be, and, in contrast to other systems of
representation, that the photographic image is produced through direct contact with
that which is represented. The camera, as Geoffrey Batchen has noted, ‘does more than
just look at the world; it is also touched by the world’. Light bounces off a body and
enters in through the aperture of the camera’s lens to touch a surface covered by an
emulsion sensitive to that light. From this encounter, understood as the product of the
reflection of a body, or as the product of light that carries with it the form of the body
because it could not penetrate the body, the photographic image is created. It is for this
reason that photography materializes the arrival of the I as other: I am an other39 is
what all portraits say. ‘It is as if those objects reached out and impressed themselves on
the surface of a photograph, leaving their visual imprint, as faithful to the contour of the
original object as a death mask is to the deceased. Photographs can thus claim to be a
kind of chemical fingerprint.’40 In this sense, the album’s photographs contain their
referent, this subject named Ana Cristina Cesar. A life whose logic, the editorial
perspective in which the photographs have been organized would have us read, follows
a single, straight line; a life whose logic can always already be seen, a future already
subjected and subjetivized, and thus naturalizing in this way, with a minimal gesture, as
much the album’s composition as the biographic subject as writer. It is the impression
of Ana Cristina, the presence in absence, the inscription of life, the breath of life
that would perhaps be able to recompose the life that her sudden death ‘interrupted’,
36 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

left ‘in suspense, ‘undefined’. Defining and continuing a life. Correcting, in this way,
dispersion. Apprehending, with that gesture, the delirious (devairado) subject.
‘We are nostalgic’ (‘Temos saudade’),41 writes Armando Freitas Filho in his brief
introduction to this first posthumous edition and, upon turning the page this
melancholic movement through which the book is constituted is further underlined.
Under the weight of nostalgia/saudade, Ana Cristina appears: a close-up shot, in which
the face of the poet is the only thing clearly visible in the image. A face emerging from a
haziness, a face with a glimpse of a smile, eyes gazing fixedly at the camera, allowing
herself to be photographed, to be watched. Nothing surprising in the portrait –
nothing, that is, until it is considered retrospectively. After looking at the album in its
entirety, and upon returning to this first portrait, it is surprising how unposed the
photograph is, how unplayful it is. How it lacks those characteristics – that constant,
playful staging of an I – of the majority of the portraits from the same period – the
1980s – included in Inéditos e dispersos, in which Ana Cristina appears either in dark
glasses or visibly posing as a lady from another era, already laying out, in both cases, a
distance between subject and image, pointing out as well the separation between image
and representation/technical reproduction.
The pose – distance, errancy, detour – of the poet’s portraits is read not only in
the ocular barrier but also in the mode in which she wears her clothes, the mode
in which her face contorts with a certain expression, in that theatricality which appears
to drive the majority of the album’s images of an adult Ana Cristina. It is as if the
photographed subject wanted to guarantee that the portrait could not be read as
transparent, as referential, as document of or access to an interiority, as the sign of a
truth, as the revelation of an I. The first portrait, then, surprises exactly for the same
reasons that would seem to indicate its entirely unsurprising quality: that apparent trifle,
a portrait without a background, without a facial expression, without gesturality – even
the smile would seem to be unfulfilled – a portrait without theatre, a face with eyes,
eyes that look, eyes that can be seen, which do not hide, eyes which return the gaze.
Yet if intimacy is an optical illusion – a phrase taken from one of Flora Süssekind’s
readings of Ana Cristina’s work – this naked portrait, this portrait seemingly without a
pose, would be nothing more than the illusion of intimacy, the phantasmagoria of
intimacy.
The reader enters into the poems and the unedited texts, then, thanks to the
editorial selection, invited by that exposed gaze, that nakedness that would appear to
give off intimacy. And certainly, some of the lines, written between 1979 and 1982 and
included in Inéditos e dispersos, affirm that: ‘literature as clé, ciphered form to speak of
the passion that can’t/be named (as in a fluent and “objective” letter).// the key, the
origin of literature/ the unconfessable takes shape, desires to take shape, becomes
shape’ (‘a literatura como clé, forma cifrada de falar da paixão que não pode / ser
nomeada (como numa carta fluente e “objetiva”). // a chave, a origem da literatura / o
‘inconfessável toma forma, deseja tomar forma, vira forma.’) Yet, in the lines that
follow, the poetic I retraces and returns to literature’s ability to give shape to that
which cannot be named, that cannot confess itself because, it continues, ‘it happens
that this is also my sympton, “not being able to speak”/ not having a demarcated
position, ideas, opinions, delerious speech/ My speech is made up only of the unsaid,
of delicacies’ (‘acontece que este é também o meu sintoma, “não conseguir falar” / não
ter posição marcada, idéias, opiniões, fala desvairada. / Só de não ditos ou de
 ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 37

delicadezas se faz minha conversa’).42 Not having a demarcated position: from this the
multiple poses in the photographs, the acting, the staging, the constant exile of the I.
‘Only of the unsaid’ (‘Só de não ditos’).
The poetic I of ‘Ulysses’, one of the unedited poems that would appear in this 1985
edition, would ask itself, ‘Who chose this face for me?’ (‘Quem escolheu este rosto
para mim?’), after having affirmed that ‘And he and the others see me’ (‘E ele e os
outros me vêem’). The poetic I of ‘Ulysses’ would ask, in another later poem – we
might imagine another poem as an answer given that peculiar constitution of Ana
Cristina’s poetic I as conversation, a conversation among voices, often from one poem
to another, a dialogue between poetic I and poetic I, as Flora Süssekind has pointed
out – almost shouting, ‘I don’t know me anymore, I’m losing me,/ I want them to
read my horoscope, to say “you are”/ like this’ (‘não me conheço mais, me perco, /
quero que façam meu horóscopo, que digam “você é / assim”.43 And thus the poetic I
will no longer ask itself which other, which exteriority, will have chosen for it a face
among many, in order to figure, to visualize the I – in this way, to frame it, to classify,
enclose, anchor it. Instead it will ask, desperately, that the other give the I a definition
of itself and, why not, a face. From the ‘not having a demarcated position . . . speaking
deliriously’ to the ‘I hope they tie me / to some piece of land (‘Espero que me liguem /
a algum pedaço de terra’): because, as the poetic I would say in another later poem,
‘I’m waiting as though I were in Lisbon/ and as though I were nostalgic for Lisbon’
(‘Espero como se estivesse em Lisboa / e sentisse saudades de Lisboa’); because, as she
will have stated at the beginning of the poem ‘I can’t find / in the midst of all those
stories / any which is mine’ (‘Nao encontro / no meio de todas essas histórias /
nenhuma que seja a minha’). And it is perhaps in that movement from one to the other
that we can begin to discern another relation within Ana Cristina’s poetics or, more
specifically, between the method with which the poetic I is conceived in the young
woman’s writings, and photography. It is in that relation, in principle strange and
sinister – as, literally, unheimlich – between the almost infinite appearance of editions
and posthumous texts of Ana Cristina and the explosion of the insertion of
photographic portraits of the writer in those editions that perhaps, while unheimlich,
other poetic strategies may be revealed.
‘The period covered is from 1976 to 1980’, we read on the back cover of the book
Correspondência incompleta, edited by Heloisa Buarque and Armando Freitas in 1999, of
the letters of the poet written to Heloisa Buarque, Cecilia Londres, Clara Alvim and
Ana Candida. A book which, as the back cover will go on to say, ‘reveals Ana C., in her
intimacy’.44 If ‘intimacy is an optical illusion’, perhaps it is therefore not a coincidence
that, even more than in the subsequent printings of A teus pés it is this book – a
collection of letters that are supposed to reveal to us Ana Cristina in her intimacy –
that exploits and exacerbates the inclusion of photographic images. The photographs
here are inserted throughout the book, rather than collected together at the beginning
in a closed album added to the collection of poems, as would be the case in the
posthumous reissue of A teus pés or in the edition of Inéditos e dispersos. In this sense,
they construct, along with the letters, a ‘guidebook’, ‘a script’, an almost cinemato-
graphic. This is not the pop serialization of the Ana Cristina-as-Marilyn-à-la-Warhol,
her eyes covered with those huge dark classes, superimposed with colours on an image
of London, as on the cover of Escritos na Inglaterra. Rather, it is a close-up that occupies
the entire cover of Correspondência incompleta, an image in which the observer is carried
38 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

away by a fantasy of intimacy superimposed upon the vertigo of understanding oneself

as a voyeur, of feeling the face of the poet so near. An intimacy that is intensified even
more by the editorial project’s decision to place the signature ‘Ana C.’, in the writer’s
calligraphy – the only letters that appear, tellingly, on that cover – in the corner of the
cover, situated so that it is right below and to the side of Ana Cristina’s mouth. In this
way, it would seem to be the graphy of her voice, a voice that has become writing, that
has become representation, a sound that is written, the flourish or signature of an I.

Postcards: I can’t seem to tell a complete story

As Flora Süssekind points out, Luvas de pelica will find its constant interlocutor in
Caderno de Portsmouth. This relationship is clearly visible, above all, in the recurrent
mention of the difficulty of writing in Luvas de pelica, in the replacement of writing by
drawing in Caderno de Portsmouth. These figures function as ideogram-letters, that is, as
the basic grammatical structure of language. Writing-with-ducks in Luvas de pelica: ‘I
don’t write anymore. I’m drawing . . . ’ (‘Não escrevo mais. Estou desenhando . . . ’45;
‘I’ll start drawing instead’ (‘vou passar a desenhar’46; ‘can you see that lake with ducks
on it? No, you / can’t see it from there . . . / I draw a dusky English duck’ (‘está vendo
aquele lago com patos? não, / você não vê daı́ . . . / eu faço um pato opaco’47; ‘I cease
writing letters./I’m designing three ducks imprisoned in a store’ (‘Desisto de escrever
carta. / Desenho três patos presos numa loja’.48 49 It is as if, in part, writing about
drawing – a kind of translation – was what allowed the poetic I to even write in Luvas
de pelica. Caderno de Portsmouth would be, precisely, that writing with duck-scribbles. A
search for a way out of the prison-house of language, for already in the first verses of
Luvas de pelica the poetic I will posit the difficulty with which and within which it is
inscribed and written: ‘I can’t seem to tell a complete story. You/ sent for details . . . /
but I don’t speak, not because my mouth is set . . . /I am scared of losing this silence’
(‘Não consigo contar a história completa. Você / mandou perguntar detalhes . . . /
mas não falo, não porque minha boca esteja dura . . . / Tenho medo de perder este
silêncio’). The difficulty with respect to a totality – to an ability to write a ‘complete
story’, to this request that comes to the poetic subject, in the form of letters, that she
tell the ‘little details, sort of day by day’50 (‘a vidinha tipo dia-a-dia’) – thus finds, as
the particular method of work of Luvas de pelica, an answer and a way out, a breathing, a
counterpoint, in Caderno de Porstmouth.
On one hand, the drawing of ducks; on the other hand, Luvas de pelica makes
explicit another way out of writing, another method and material from which to
construct poetry: ‘bright and beautiful postcards’. In this sense, the postcard would
function as method and material for Luvas de pelica. It is a form that Ana Cristina had
already been practising in her correspondence, having already appeared, with greater
brevity, in Cenas de Abril – ‘Be the greta,/ the garbo,/ the eternal liu-chiang of red
postcards’ (‘Ser a greta, / o garbo, / a eterna liu-chiang dos postais vermelhos’)51 –
and that would appear, perhaps less explicitly but equally centrally, in the new poems
of A teus pés. For it would seem that in A teus pés the postcard has been incorporated into
the structure of the writing and of the narration, as the form – the only form – in
which the I can speak. Fragments of a ‘memory’, of a ‘real’, ‘true’ life: ‘Soundtrack
in the background./ . . . / Memories . . . / Autobiography. Not biography./
 ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 39

. . . Daydream./ . . . ‘Another scene from my life’ (‘Trilha sonora ao fundo. / . . . /

Memórias . . . / Autobiografia. Não biografia. / . . . / Daydream. / . . . / Outra cena
de minha vida’).52 Memories in A teus pés appear like snapshots, rapid sprays of images
that the poetic I would seem to be taking out of a suitcase, as the narrator of the
‘Epı́logo’ from Luvas de Pelica will do – ‘I am going to pass around in a minute some
lovely, glossy-blue / picture postcards’.53 But these memories are dreams, which
are scenes, which are film stills and, in this sense, far from any notion of ‘truth’.
The postcard appears, then, as a method of writing and also as the only possibility for a
poetic I to narrate itself. An I, therefore, not only already fragmented, already in pieces
but furthermore only as splinter; a narration of the I in instalments.
Faced with the difficulty of writing, of the possibility of relating the day-to-day –
whether as correspondence or as diary, the two predominant forms in Luvas de pelica –
writing-as-postcards emerges as an alternative. Postcards that would appear to be
infinite – ‘we have cards enough to last the whole night’54 (‘temos cartões para a noite
inteira’) – and heterogeneous – memories of cities, actors, art works. Carefully kept
in a suitcase, their unfolding by the narrator is reminiscent of the phantasmagoric
spectacles of the nineteenth-century. Precisely because the spectacle will be incredible,
the narrator tries throughout the poem to consolidate her credibility: ‘there is no
deception’, ‘there is no gimmick, no hidden trap door, / no trick lighting’; ‘this is a
suitcase, not a top hat with rabbits’ (‘Não há fraude’, ‘não há nenhum truque, nenhum
alçapão escondido, nem jogos de luz enganadores’, ‘isto é uma valise, não é uma cartola
com coelhos’).55
Yet the postcard, as souvenir, as clipping, reproduction, representation and
metonymy of a referent, external and total, would be another method to undermine
the totality, the ‘complete story’, and the very possibility of the figuration of an I, that
which the other demands of the poetic I throughout Luvas de pelica.
‘I’m trying’, the narrator-magician of the ‘Epilogue’ reads on the other side of one
of the postcards, ‘to send you a little bit of where I am, but there’s always something
missing’ (‘Fico tentando te mandar um pedacinho de onde estou mas fica faltando
sempre’).56 The postcard, that intent to capture a ‘little piece’ of the real is, in this
sense, analogous to the photograph.
Whenever we encounter a photograph, we come face to face with a trace and, in
this sense, more than with any other kind of image – with the exception, perhaps, of
film – and any other system of representation, we are faced with an undeniable
referent.57 Yet despite this material characteristic that makes of photography an
impression – analogous to a digital impression – photography is not a document. This
paradox at the very centre of the photographic object became evident within theory
through the emergence of a critical discourse of photography in the 1970s. However,
when we observe certain photographs from the nineteenth century – and in particular
the genre of the portrait – we can already find, in the initial stages of that new science, a
consciousness of this aporia. It is enough to examine certain visiting cards, those first
proto-postcards, of the era – the material medium upon which photography, in the mid-
1850s, becomes mass produced and serialized, leaving behind the unique and fragile
images of the first daguerreotypes, in which the subject posed in front of the camera in a
photographic studio, with different backdrops, many of a fantastic nature. We can sense
that those first portraits were already introducing a fissure in – or perhaps better, an
other side to – this trace of the real. Those theatrical scenes of the early decades of
40 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

photography, often accompanied by appropriate costumes (or not) were already

pointing towards the relationship between photography and desire, in which figuration
could be thought as a figure-en-abime, an artifice – while, at the same time, the
representation of an empirical body – that would not refer infallibly to that empirical
truth to which it was subject, but rather to a spectacle or exhibition of desire or, better,
to a technical reproduction of desire. In this way, the photographic portrait – but also
photography in general – upon constructing and exhibiting subjectivities, configures, for
its part, the constitution of subjectivity as a staging of fantasy, positioning desire at the
very centre of the subject and of the process of subjectivization. If desire is at the very
centre of these processes, internal and external, of subjectivization; if desire is thus the
Real; and if, on one hand, the photographic portrait is the staging of that desire, then the
portrait, on another hand, could be thought of as an aperture into the abyss – an abyss of
the pure, flat surface, an abyss devoid of depth. An abyss because desire is that which
mobilizes but which can never be grasped, and photography, as representation, captures,
in both the empirical and imaginary orders, something that will be exposed – revealed,
disclosed – in the encounter, upon this flat surface of the photograph. Yet there is also
something – that very desire – that cannot be captured, that always escapes, that cannot
take on a shape, a representation. Desire, in the very centre of the photograph, is the
flight line, the secret, the punctum, the visual prosopopoeia that escapes the mechanism –
and which also mobilizes it, propels the functioning of that I – but which inhabits it in
dispersion: diffused, ungraspable. Photography as a mirror is nothing more than a hollow
in the wall.58
‘There’s always something missing’ (‘Fica faltando sempre’), we read, then, in the
verses of Ana Cristina Cesar, rhizomatically in echo with those other artistic practices
of the 1970s within and outside Brazil. As she would write in a few individual, unedited
lines, ‘mirror, a hollow in the wall’, reaffirming, in another line, ‘Your portrait, a
hollow in the wall’ (‘espelho, buraco na parede’, ‘Teu retrato, buraco na parede’).
This hollow is a lack, which is also desire. Photography will be useful for Ana Cristina
precisely because within it ‘there is always something missing’. If that game around the
writing of the I and the intimacy of the photograph allows for the rehearsal of desire,
the posthumous editions, with their ‘iconographic guidebooks/scripts’, would appear
to cancel out what we might think of as the central axis of Ana Cristina Cesar’s poetics:
the invention of desire.
Translated by Sarah Ann Wells

Notes
Note on the Translator – Sarah Ann Wells is a PhD candidate in the Department of
Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
1 The word in Portuguese is ‘buraco’, which implies, simultaneously, ‘hollow’, ‘hole’,
‘gap’, and ‘cavity’. – Trans.
2 Arbus, Diane. 1971. Five photographs by Diane Arbus. Artforum May, as quoted in
Diane Arbus: Revelations, 278.
3 Cesar, Album de retazos.
4 Concise Oxford English Dictionary. 11th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004: 30.
 ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 41

5 Cesar, A teus pé, 106; César, Intimate diary, 32. Unless otherwise indicated, other
translations are the translator’s.
6 A tus pés, 91.
7 Ibid., 106; Intimate diary, 32. The word ‘vitrina’ in the original is more specific than
the ‘window’ of the English translation; it refers to the shop window in which
merchandise is displayed. – Trans.
8 Here I am playing with the title of Ana Cristina’s Masters thesis in Communication:
Literatura não é documento. Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1980, or ‘Literature is not a
document’.
9 Sontag, On photography, Barthes, La chambre claire.
10 The author plays with the two meanings of the word ‘revelación’: to reveal and to
develop, as in a photographic negative. – Trans.
11 Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique and de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’.
12 De Man, 920.
13 The word ‘approach’ is in English in the original. – Trans.
14 Cesar, 279 and 289, respectively.
15 In addition to the Bataille text already cited, see also the work of Crimp, Douglas.
1998. On the museum’s ruins. In The anti-aesthetic. essays on postmodern culture, edited
by Hal Foster. New York: New Press: 49– 64.
16 Bataille, Manet, 51.
17 Garramuño, ‘En estado de emergencia.
18 Cesar, A teus pés, 69; Intimate diary, 83.
19 In the original, the ‘I switch’ in italics is written in English – Trans.
20 A teus pés, 91; Intimate diary, 101.
21 Süssekind, Até segunda ordem não me risque nada.
22 A teus pés, 35; Intimate diary, 61.
23 Süssekind, 9.
24 Here the author uses the word ‘ensayo’, which also means ‘essay’ or ‘attempt’. –
Trans.
25 Ibid., 12. It seems to me that the first photographic project of Cindy Sherman,
contemporary to Ana Cristina’s production, functions as the perfect other side to this
poetic experimentation. Sherman, a young woman from New York and a graduate in
Visual Arts, having recently moved to Manhattan, was trying, in the late 1970s, to
create a project that would define her as an artist. She begins, in 1977 – some years
after Ana Cristina has begun her poetic practice – to photograph herself in a series of
black-and-white images in which she poses/acts as different (imaginary) actresses,
observed in the intimacy of their houses: in the kitchen, the bathroom, the bed. In this
way she constructed from herself the characters which would comprise the series,
Untitled film stills, composed between 1977 and 1980. The methodology that Ana
Cristina, as the present reading suggests, elaborates is precisely the methodology that
Cindy Sherman would find through her film stills: autobiography and photography as
disfiguration, as a way out of truth but, at the same time, or perhaps precisely because
of this, as a shop window of desire. Between posing and acting – for this and other
reasons they are called film stills – Sherman appears in disguise, with wigs, composing
her self-non-portraits. Working with clichés of pop culture, her film stills work by way
of a double recognition on the spectator’s part: on one hand the sensation of
recognizing where the image belongs to and, on the other, in recognizing the subject
that appears. Yet if the stills are self-portraits, they are only in so far as figures-en-abime,
42 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

in so far as something like a visual prosopopoeia, and given that they do not refer to any
film, we could think that this double recognition is nothing more than the product of
the projection of desire. Sherman’s project works on a double negation: self-portraits
but not of herself; film stills that belong to no film. In this sense, the photographs do not
refer, essentially, to anything. Sherman’s experiment resulted in a total of 69 images
and in a project (Untitled film stills) that radicalized photography in the US. This, at a
moment in which photography was still stuck in a certain documentarian and
ethnographic gaze – which emerged, to a great extent, from the project of the Farm
Security Administration. Yet Untitled film stills, in its dialogue with other works in the
field of visual and conceptual art that were using photography as a methodology of
other works treating subjectivity, referentiality, the relationship between art and life –
we can think of the projects of Adrian Piper, such as ‘Food for Thought’ (1971) or ‘The
Mythic Being’ (1975), or certain works of Gerard Richter beginning in 1972, as well as
the era’s experiments with performance art (and this genealogy could also include
performances of Marina Abramovic such as ‘Role Exchange’ in 1975 or the masks with
mirrors Lygia Clark would construct in the late 1970s) – was making clear on one hand
the centrality of the photographic mechanism, to a great extent as vehicle, and on the
other a questioning of the limits of the I in the articulation of contemporary art. In this
sense, it is no coincidence that the film Blade Runner (1982), an emblem, or classic of
that era and its problematics, would be the staging of a crisis in subjectivity, and that
photography, the gaze and the autobiographic story would function as the mechanisms
upon which and from which this crisis would be played out. Perhaps like Deckard, the
futurist replica of that film, and like Descartes (Descartes/Deckard) Sherman and
Cesar – like Piper, Richter, Rauschenberg, Oiticica, etc. – all know that there is no
direct access to the world, only to its representations and that representations only
circle around that which escapes from perception, understanding and imagination:
desire. See Krauss, Rosalind. 2000. Cindy Sherman: Untitled. In Bachelors. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press: 101 – 59; and Bruno, Giuliana. 1987. Ramble city: Postmodernism
and Blade Runner. October 41: 61– 74, for compelling and suggestive readings of
Sherman and Blade Runner respectively.
26 Ibid., 9.
27 Cesar, Correspondências incompletas, 192.
28 Buarque de Hollanda, ed. Vinte e seis poetas hoje, 97.
29 Süssekind, Literatura e vida literária, 124.
30 Süssekind, ibid., 132.
31 Cesar, A teus pés, 152.
32 Within this problem surrounding the editorial use of visual material in the publication
of Ana Cristina’s writings, we should certainly pause over the exception, the author’s
own addition of Caderno de Portsmouth– Colchester from 1980, a book which was
intended as an object while the poet was still living, and on whose cover Ana Cristina
had decided to place a photographic portrait of herself. This photograph was then
reproduced in the posthumous edition of Inéditos e dispersos, in which Ana Cristina
is leaning against a white railing, hands in her pockets, looking at the camera through
glasses. Next to the young woman, a suitcase. Has she just arrived, is she leaving?
From where, where to? This exception – the only book that Ana Cristina intended
with that photograph – is perhaps neither strange nor exceptional, if we take into
account the absence of a title for the book and, where the proper name itself might
appear as the title, the photographic portrait of the author as a kind of subheading.
 ANA CRISTINA CESAR: POETRY AND PHOTOGRAPHY 43

Critics began to refer to the book as Caderno de Portsmouth –Colchester simply because
the name of those two cities appears underneath the photography. In any case, it
would be Ana Cristina Cesar’s name that could serve as a title, upon reading the name,
in capital letters, at the top of the cover. It is worth pausing over this detail of the
graphic organization because, although Ana Cristina’s poetry is not in any way a direct
descendent of the traditional avant-garde (as in the modernists or the Concrete poets)
in which the visual organization formed part of a programmatic exercise around the
poetry, this book, perhaps her most experimental, is to a great extend a ‘pictographic
exercise’ (Süssekind). Yet also, if on one hand the photograph of the author, situated
as a subheading or subtitle of the book, is surprising – if we were to consider the name
as the title – on the other hand the inscription is not surprising, in the context of a
poet who works constantly at decentring the poetic subject, the concrete, fixed
subjectivity: as this fixity is sustained, literally, by a spatial-temporal displacement
from Portsmouth to Colchester, from 30 June to 12 July 1980.
33 The author uses the adjective ‘desvairado’, which can mean ‘mad’, ‘delirious’,
‘hallucinated’, or ‘extravagant’. – Trans.
34 Süssekind, Até segunda ordem, 12– 13.
35 Cesar, A teus pés 80; Intimate diary, 92.
36 Cesar, Inéditos e dispersos. Poesia e prosa, 35.
37 Ibid., 198.
38 Cesar, ‘Luvas de pelica’, A teus pés, 136; Intimate diary, 18.
39 Barthes, ibid.
40 ‘Photography is privileged within modern culture because, unlike other systems of
representation, the camera does more than just see the world; it is also touched by the
world. Light bounces off an object or a body and into the camera, activating a light-
sensitive emulsion and creating an image. Photographs are therefore designated as
indexical signs, images produced as a consequence of being directly affected by the
objects to which they refer’. Batchen, Forget Me Not, 31.
41 Anther possible translation would be ‘We miss her’, although the original does not use
the pronoun. The Portuguese word ‘saudade’ is not entirely equivalent to nostalgia;
encompassing both a retrospective and prospective longing for a lost object, it is
notoriously untranslatable. – Trans.
42 Inéditos e dispersos, 126.
43 Ibid., 168.
44 Cesar, Correpondências incompletas.
45 Cesar, ‘Luvas de pelica’, A teus pés, 125.
46 Ibid., 126.
47 Ibid., 127.
48 Ibid., 129.
49 The translations are from Intimate diary, 9 –11.
50 Ibid., 13.
51 Cesar, ‘Instruções de bordo’, A teus pés, 94.
52 Intimate diary, 61– 2.
53 This phrase is in English in the original. – Trans.
54 Intimate diary, 27.
55 Ibid., 26– 7.
56 Cesar, ‘Epı́logo’, A teus pés, 148 – 9; Intimate diary, 28.
44 LATIN AMERICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

57 I am citing and reconfiguring in this initial sentence the beginning of Georges Didi-
Huberman’s work on anachronism and temporality in the image, which has been
fundamental for the development of this essay: ‘Facing an image we are always facing
time’ (‘Siempre, ante la imagen, estamos ante el tiempo’). See Didi-Huberman, Ante
el tiempo, 11.
58 I am playing here with two verses of Ana Cristina Cesar, unedited during her life time,
and which Flora Süssekind, in her study of the poet, will salvage: ‘Mirror, a hollow in
the wall’ and ‘Your portrait, a hollow in the wall’ (‘Espelho, buraco na parede’ y ‘Teu
retrato, buraco na parede’).

References
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Bataille, Georges. 2003. Manet. Trad. Juan Gregorio Murcia: IVAM Documentos.
Batchen, Geoffrey. 2004. Forget me not: Photography and remembrance. New York and
Amsterdam: Princeton Architectural Press and Van Gogh Museum.
Buarque de Hollanda, Heloı́sa, 1976 ed. Vinte e seis poetas hoje. Rio de Janeiro: Labor.
Cesar, Ana Cristina. 1977. Intimate Diary. Trans. Patricia E. Paige, Celia McCullough and
David Treece. London: Boulevard.
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revista. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG.

Natalia Brizuela is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the
University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on Argentine and Brazilian cultural
production of the nineteenth and twentieth century, particularly on the intersection
between literature, visual culture, technologies and new media. She is currently
completing a book on nineteenth-century Brazilian photography, nationalism and
melancholy.