Klaus Mitteldorf
Inventing Vision

WORDS | ANDREW KAISER AND KIRK BROMLEY

Many would have you believe there are basically two types of photographers; those that seek to capture the world as it is, and those that seek to portray the world as it might be.

The first group is driven to discover unique and rare visions that already exist, while the second attempts to create unique and rare visions that have never existed - a fantasy world sought by painters since the dawn of time. No creative mode is better then the other, they simply exist and survive the tests of time on their own merits.

To the latter category belongs Brazilian photographer, Klaus Mitteldorf. A major force in the fashion, advertising, and photo-art worlds of Brazil and beyond, Mitteldorf has over the last thirty years of his career carved out a niche for himself as a photographer of compelling, innovative, and uncompromising quality and talent. His work walks the fine line between nature and artifice, presenting a vibrant contrast in colors and forms that both draws you into the seductive ambience of the shot and forces you back to a position from which you can more easily absorb the riveting, often tactile dynamics of the subjected land-scape. A Mitteldorf photo, in short, cuts through the viewer with the sharp force of a soft embrace.

Born in Sao Paulo in the summer of 1953, Mitteldorf graduated from Braz Cubas University of Architecture and Urbanism in 1979 and subsequently dedicated himself completely to the arts of photography and cinema. His first photographs were published during his student days in magazines like Brazil Surf, Pop, and Casa Vogue, with most of them showing figures or scenes in or around the ocean surf which he considered at that time to be his primary inspiration and which still plays an important role in his mise-en-scene.

As the 1980's began, Mitteldorf's unique sensibility for the way in which a model's shape responds to and manipulates its environment drew the attention of the big guns in fashion and advertising, and his career took a turn for the richer. In the fashion world his images were appearing in Vogue, Interview, Elle, and the European and Brazilian editions of Playboy. In advertising he worked with the largest European and Brazilian agencies, receiving various awards and critical raves. Then, in 2002, he won the Conrado Wessel Foundation Photography Award, the ultimate accolade for a Brazilian photographer.

Throughout his career, Mitteldorf has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in a variety of countries, and he has published more than a half dozen books for international distribution. His most recent book is entitled Mermaids (Gingko Press) which contains a mixture of images - some nudes, some human action shots, some objects and structures - all having to do with water in its many forms and uses. As in his work in general, the photographs in Mermaids are intensely passionate while also being eerily objective, giving the sense that Mitteldorf's mind is an aesthetic landscape inhabited by fleshy ghosts and highly significant sea wrack.

On top of Mitteldorf's photographic work, he directs commercials and short films and produces TV graphic design for production houses and stations in his native land. And indeed, in looking at his photographs, one can see that such work has not only been a side project, but has come to directly inform his photographic work as well. Many Mitteldorf photos seem like stills from a moving picture, frozen mid-action, part of a larger progression, infused with a propelling calm that points to a greater story not represented, yet palpably suggested, by the contents of the frame.

Mitteldorf truly exhibits in his oeuvre the artistic possibilities of photography. Every image he gives us offers a plethora of interpretations, and leaves us with more questions than answers. The viewer is simultaneously drawn in and pushed back by the sheer audacity and novelty of his vision. In this sense, Mitteldorf is producing photographs that remind us that vision is as much about receiving as it is about giving.