For SP-Foto 2020, Galeria Millan presents a selection of works by Bob Wolfenson, who completes 50 years of his career this year. Born in the Bom Retiro, neighborhood in São Paulo, Bob Wolfenson was raised in an syncretic Judaism/socialism environement. At the age of 16, still as an apprentice at Editora Abril, the artist began a trajectory that would become a vocational call: the moment in which photographic work becomes central in his life, in such a way that today it is impossible to dissociate artist and work.
The selection presented here includes portraits, fashion photos, polaroids, images extracted from his books/expositions, travel photos, photographic notes, family albums and female nudes made for commissioned works. Having side by side images of different and even irreconcilable shows times, subjects and places itself to be a great challenge when one intends to realize, even if succinctly, such a long and multifaceted career.
Wolfenson continues to reaffirm his potentiality in moving through the various genres of photography without the need to fix himself on the same theme. The characteristic retrospective look of this selection also proposes a deepening in the outstanding aspects of his trajectory: restlessness, indiscipline and humor, traits that have accompanied the artist since the beginning of his thinking about the construction of the image.
At this moment of celebration of his trajectory, it is up to the artist to draw a parallel between past and present: "Looking back also stirs up the question of how to wander through the voids and uncertainties of the future. (...) However, resisting - in the most comprehensive sense of the term - in personal, professional and political life, is a legacy of my first formation and it is resisting that I follow".