Bonito Series

COUNTRY: BRAZIL
CITY: BONITO - MS
YEAR: 2008 - 2010

Valdir Cruz did not forget the legacy of the great masters of photography, and produced an essay that summarizes a purely visual immersive experience. A perfect balance between intuition and intellect. Bonito is an innovating essay, the result of decades of work polished and tested in different thematics. If “technique (is a) test of man’s sincerity” as poet Ezra Pound held, Valdir Cruz brought all of his experience to this work. With his technical and emotional competency he potentized an invisible force that organizes and aligns the different objects – stones, leaves, pebbles, branches, fish, and others – that upon being photographed lead the viewers’s gaze into a reverie…Marcel Proust wrote that “the true journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in possessing new eyes”. And this is exactly what drove Valdir Cruz in this essay, since at the same time that he avoided the hurried and vulgarized image of the contemporary world, he sought registers that are impressive for their temporal density, for the disintegration of their forms, and for how they imbue that ancestral landscape with dazzling, nearly unexpected air of fantasy.

Rubens Fernandes Junior

Wellspring of the Baía Bonita River – VI 2010
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Second Wellspring of the Sucuri River – 2009
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Waterfall of the Cave of Limestone – 2009
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Stalagmite – 2010
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Wellspring of the Baía Bonita River, II - 2009
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Encounter of Exus – 2008
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Guardian – Speleothem – 2009
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Mata-Pau Fig Tree – 2009
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Amor Waterfall – 2009
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Volcano of the Olho d’Água River – 2009
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Formoso River, I – 2008
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil

Landscape at the Wellspring of the Bonito River – 2009
Bonito, Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil