Valdir Cruz

Promoting ecology through art, Cruz’s compendium references multiple inspirations. Audubon, John Muir, Edward Curtis and Walker Evans are touchstones. Echoes of traditional devotional imagery add an extra dimension of interpretive possibility. Rare trees, withered and gnarled, keep reaching….Themes of singularity and struggle couple with a dynamic handling of form and scale. The restrained palette concentrates the impact, increasing punch and power as Cruz imbues his mute subjects with infinite compassion. Emotion and life cry out in these sculptural images, evocatively antiqued and rarified by being represented in black and white. Cruz captures monumentally the “eyeless thing” staring at us. —Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

His composition is elegant and imaginative. Nothing escapes from his attentive gaze that elaborates a visual universe based on a map of procedures that reveals pure forms and impertinent abstractions, with strange and pulsating lights. His large-format matrix registers a teeming, nearly pristine nature. One can perceive that Valdir waited patiently for the moment at which the entire improbable natural order of everyday scenes enters into revolution and explodes into the beauty of his photography. He discovers certain visible structures and creates a connection between them; he concentrates a disconcerting power in the image that excites our senses. —Rubens Fernandes Junior

For New York-based photographer Valdir Cruz, the view camera is an instrument for disclosure and interpretation, not simply a means of exposure and recording. Through an increasingly complex series of photographic studies, Cruz demonstrates the commitment of a cultural anthropologist and the patience of an artist. Cruz's work is distinguished by its observant and unaffected pictorialism, clarity of vision, and the high achievement of the printed image itself. —Edward Leffingwell

In 1996 Cruz was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Faces of the Rainforest, a project documenting the life of indigenous people in the Brazilian Rainforest. The Guggenheim Foundation further supported this project with a publication subvention award in 2000.

Since 1982 his photographs have been the subject of more than fifty solo exhibitions at venues including the National Arts Club, New York City; the Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; FotoFest International, Houston, TX; the São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil. His work has been included in group shows at the New York Public Library, New York City; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, among other institutions.

Cruz became interested in photography in the late 1970s through George Stone’s work for National Geographic and began to study photography at the Germain School in 1983. He then received technical and aesthetic training from George Tice at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. He was influenced by Edward Steichen, Horst P. Horst, and W. Eugene Smith. He collaborated with Tice in the authorized production of two Steichen portfolios, Juxtapositions (1986) and Blue Skies (1987) after which time he devoted his energies exclusive to his own work.

Valdir Cruz (born 1952) is a Brazilian-American photographer. Born in Guarapuava, in the southern state of Paraná, Brazil, Cruz has lived in the United States since 1984. He currently divides his time between his studios in New York City and São Paulo. Much of his work in photography has focused on the people, architecture and landscape of Brazil.