By Sonia Corrêa
Anna Kahn is a Brazilian photographer who lives in Rio. In 2007, she made public the series Stray Bullet in which she documents the phantom inscription of violence in the urban landscape. Kahn described this exercise in the following terms:
“A terrifying situation whose cruelest expression is the stray bullet. The unpredictable fate of people shot at random has always marked me and inspired me to tell this story, so sadly typical of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Inspired by these dramatic encounters which daily routine has made so banal, I photographed the places where they occurred. The process of creating the work was simple. After researching the facts published in the newspapers, I made a selection of the cases of fatalities which occurred in public places. I chose the circumstances and places through which any of us could have been passing. I sought to show the streets, squares, and sidewalks in the solitude of night. This portrait of human emptiness expresses my vision of these tragedies.
Past ten years, in August 2017, one main local news paper announced that from now on it will portray the violence in the city under the title of The War in Rio. This normalization of a war semantics in the debate on violence comes after the failed experiment of ‘pacification’ that began around 2009. Rio is once again experiencing the skyrocketing of urban violence. Kahn’s artistic work is iconic of this painful ongoing tragedy.
Slide Image: photo from the series: Sem medo do escuro/ No fear of darkness
Post image: Carlos: Carlos, 46 years old, driver. Died in Vila Isabel, driving his car, coming out of the Noel Rosa tunnel
To learn more about Anna Kahn’s biography and art work
