Rosângela Rennó

From Taking Photographs to Working with Discarded Images

Rennó was born in Belo Horizonte in 1962 and studied architecture and fine art^*1. By the late 1980s she was collecting photographs, negatives, and slides discarded around editing rooms and bringing images that others had judged unnecessary into her work. MoMA notes that by the end of the decade she had developed a method based on gathering and reusing large quantities of discarded photographs^*2.

In Rennó’s own account, she consciously stopped making photographs in the mid-1980s and turned toward existing images. In 1988 she picked up film stills discarded near an editing room and later began working with thrown-away identification negatives. The shift grew from her realization that images society had already produced and rejected offered a more useful way to think about photographic value and symbolic force than continuously making new pictures. ^*21

In Brazil, memory after the military dictatorship, the disappeared, and access to public records became major political questions. Rennó addresses this history through the fate of existing documents: how classification, destruction, theft, and anonymization can weaken the historical record. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, describes her work as engaging political upheaval and the legacy of dictatorship in Latin America while asking how photography can record experience and conceal it at the same time^*3.

Making the Archive a “Workplace”

Rennó describes her work with archives as an activity in which photography becomes a “workplace.” The work here lies in moving old photographs into new settings and testing the rules through which images produce memory, rather than restoring an original story to them.^*4.

Bibliotheca is an installation made from one hundred albums and groups of slides collected around the world, arranged in ten groups across thirty-seven display cases^*5. The albums themselves are sealed, so viewers cannot freely turn their pages. Accompanying material provides clues about their contents and movements, separating the act of seeing the photographs from the act of knowing information about them^*8.

Universal Archive—A Photographic Archive Without Images

Universal Archive is an ongoing project that gathers passages about photographs from newspaper articles. The photographs themselves are absent. Rennó accumulates descriptions—statements that a photograph “showed” something or that something was “revealed by a photograph”—and lets the language evoke images that cannot be seen^*6.

This procedure unsettles the assumption that photographs function as visible evidence. Even without the image, newspaper language determines what matters and who is described as an anonymous victim or suspect. In Vulgo, photographs of prisoners’ heads are combined with texts from Universal Archive, exposing how institutions can administer bodies and narratives separately^*7.

Bibliotheca—Sealing Other People’s Albums

In Bibliotheca (1992–2002), Rennó selected and rephotographed images from old family albums acquired at flea markets and elsewhere, then sealed the original albums in transparent cases. Viewers cannot turn individual pages at will; the break between photographic origin and later ownership is built physically into the work^*8.

MACBA records Bibliotheca as a complex installation of library-like furniture, photographs, albums, and maps^*9. Albums that once held private memory occupy an unstable position between document and artwork once they enter the museum, making rights of access one of the work’s subjects.

Vulgo—Prison Bodies and Anonymization

Vulgo reuses photographs of prisoners made between the 1920s and 1940s and preserved in São Paulo’s prison museum. Scalp patterns, scars, tattoos, and other parts of the body originally photographed for identification and criminology are enlarged and paired with aliases or fragmentary words in place of names^*7.

ArtNexus notes that gaining permission to use these obsolete prisoner identification photographs involved difficult negotiations^*11. That history itself shows the mismatch among the owner of an image, the person depicted, the institution that stores it, and the artist who reuses it. Rennó does not invent biographies for anonymous bodies; she leaves visible the contradiction of a system that identifies people while stripping away personhood.

Imemorial and the Workers Missing from Brasília’s Official History

For Imemorial, Rennó selected identification photographs of workers involved in the construction of Brasília from a public archive and installed them across the wall and floor. Against the monumental architectural history of the city, the workers’ small portraits create another site of memory for those who died, disappeared, or became anonymous^*12.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts describes Rennó as using family albums, newspapers, and public records to make visible stories overlooked amid migration and political upheaval^*13. Her works do not reconstruct lost histories as complete narratives. They show how gaps in official history were produced.

Brazilian photography historian Charles Monteiro reads Imemorial as a work that questions how public institutions use, classify, and preserve photographs while inserting another memory into the official national narrative of Brasília’s construction. The portrait photographs cannot fully recover the people who have been lost. They show instead the form in which workers survived in the records of a national construction project: as identification data. ^*23

Another sociological study analyzes the workers’ portraits in Imemorial through the problem of collective memory. The small identification photographs bring individual faces forward before the city they built, yet they say little about names or lives. That imbalance is central to the work. ^*26

Recording Theft and Loss in the Photobook

Rennó’s artist’s books turn exhibitions into forms that can circulate. 2005–510117385–5 reproduces, at actual size, the backs of photographs stolen from Brazil’s National Library and later recovered, giving more attention to collection stamps, numbers, damage, and marks of ownership than to the images on the front^*14.

An MIT Press essay analyzes Rennó’s books as “counter-archives” that use theft, empty boxes, and the backs of photographs to show the vulnerability of public collections^*15. The book circulates the fact that a loss was allowed to remain within an institution instead of compensating for the missing originals.

Río-Montevideo—Reprojecting a Hidden Newspaper Archive

Río-Montevideo works with the photographic archive of the Uruguayan daily El Popular. During the July 1973 military coup, Aurelio González, who led the paper’s photography department, and his colleagues hid 48,626 negatives inside the building to protect them from destruction. Rennó began working with the material in 2011, presenting photographs made to report events as objects that also survived dictatorship by being hidden. ^*22

Exhibitions of Río-Montevideo have used old projectors and magic lanterns, sometimes allowing visitors to operate the devices that make the images visible. 1000 Words reads the project through the tension between photography’s disposability and the desire to preserve it. After a photograph has served the news once, it can enter other temporalities of storage, concealment, rediscovery, and reprojection. ^*24

Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo explains that Rennó spent about a year moving between Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo to research the archive and incorporated the institution’s cataloging system into the structure of the book. The publication becomes another archive, reediting not just the photographs but also the numbers and sequences assigned to them by the holding institution. ^*25

Forgetting Can Happen Inside Preservation

In Rennó’s work, memory is not treated as a process that simply preserves the past unchanged. Mor Charpentier notes her sustained interest in social processes that erase links to the past and in her reuse of anonymous photographs^*16. The sealed albums of Bibliotheca and the hidden archive of Río-Montevideo show concretely that preservation and public access are not the same thing.

An exhibition at CAAM reconsidered representation through works involving what does not appear in images, language, and museum classification^*17. The work refuses to fill invisible history with newly visible pictures. Missing material, unreadable information, and restrictions on access become part of what is exhibited.

Latin American Photography and International Reassessment

In 2013, Aperture introduced Rennó as an artist whose international activity had not been matched by equal attention in Anglophone photography history^*18. MoMA has also collected her work and placed her use of existing photographs and archives within its collection^*10. Her subsequent major exhibition and award at Arles further indicate the international reception of work centered on the reorganization of existing material.

At Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2023, Rennó received the Women In Motion Award and presented On the Ruins of Photography, her first major exhibition in France. The festival cited her transformations of archival material and her sustained attention to time, forgetting, and memory. In 2013, she had also received the Historical Book Award for a publication dealing with photographs stolen from Brazil’s National Library. ^*19

Her presence in international collections, including the Museo Reina Sofía, shows that Rennó’s work has continued to be received both within Brazilian debates over memory and within broader discussions about photography and the archive^*20. The works make these questions specific: the sealed albums of Bibliotheca, the identification portraits of Imemorial, and the stolen or hidden materials in Río-Montevideo each show a different institutional treatment of photographs.

In Bibliotheca, transparent cases stop the hand from turning pages. In Universal Archive, there is no image to see. In Río-Montevideo, the work includes not just photographic surfaces but backs, catalog information, and traces of concealment. Each project interrupts the expectation that an archive is simply a place where photographs are shown. Differences in who can touch an image and how much information can be read become literal differences in viewing distance and visibility.

Recontextualizing Images Without Speaking for the Missing

When Rennó works with anonymous photographs, she leaves the missing names and circumstances missing instead of replacing them with a new story about the person depicted. Bibliotheca’s sealed albums, the bodily fragments in Vulgo, and the identification photographs of Imemorial keep those gaps intact and ask who made the record and at what point a name or context was separated from the photograph. What the works recover is the history of that separation, not a complete person reconstructed after the fact.

Recent scholarship has likewise examined Rennó’s archival work through questions of how marginalized memory, erasure, and violence can be retold. Farol reads Rennó’s archival work as turning the archive from a fixed storehouse of history into a narrative device for reconsidering what was made visible and what was excluded. ^*27

In Bibliotheca, private family albums move into museum cases; in Vulgo, criminological identification photographs become enlarged bodily fragments; in Río-Montevideo, hidden press photographs return as works that include their reverse sides and traces of concealment. Rennó does more than quote existing images freely: each series keeps visible the institutional passage from one setting to another. Discarding, collecting, theft, and sealing determine how the photographs can appear.