Miguel Rio Branco. Maldicidade

Rot has never looked this good, and that is the accusation the pictures invite. Miguel Rio Branco photographs the parts of a city everyone is trained to look past, the peeling walls and bleeding neon and bodies at the margin, and he renders them with the saturated glory of Renaissance painting. The title fuses malediction and city into one cursed word. The images argue that the curse is also, inconveniently, beautiful.

Rio Branco built this vocabulary in Salvador da Bahia and the harbour zones of Brazil, in brothels and boxing gyms and streets the tourist board would rather you skipped. He has worked as a Magnum affiliate, a filmmaker, a painter, and the cross-training is visible in every frame. He does not photograph a place so much as metabolise it, returning colour and heat and menace in roughly the proportions the place actually delivers.

His long project in the crumbling red-light quarter of old Salvador is the seedbed for all of it, a district he returned to for years until the residents were less subjects than collaborators. The boxers came from the same instinct, the ring as a stage where bodies are beautiful and breaking at once.

Colour is the whole engine. Rio Branco trained as a painter and it shows in how he weights a frame: deep reds pulled to the edge of black, a wound of yellow, skin lit like old varnish. He shoots decay at the exact hour it turns luminous, catching the moment before the eye files something away as ugly. A cracked wall becomes a fresco, a stray dog a figure out of Goya, a boxer's taped hands a study fit for a museum wall. The palette is not decoration laid over hard subject matter. The palette is the argument that the hard subject matter was always worth this much attention, and that the flinch most photographers feel is a failure of nerve, not taste.

None of it is comfortable.

Look at how he handles a light source. A bare bulb, a doorway, a slick of reflection on wet asphalt: each becomes a small furnace the surrounding dark presses in on. The TASCHEN printing has to hold enormous shadow detail without letting the reds go muddy, and it mostly does, which matters more here than in almost any other kind of photography. Wash these images out and the whole thesis collapses. The blacks have to stay black for the colour to mean anything.

He sequences like a film editor, pairing images so a gesture in one rhymes with a stain in the next. Meaning accumulates in the cut between frames. A body and a carcass, a saint and a sex worker, a flame and a bruise: the diptychs refuse to explain themselves and gain force by the refusal. This is a photographer who thinks in montage, not caption.

There is a fair worry that beauty this insistent risks aestheticising misery, turning poverty into a colour scheme. The pictures earn their defence by staying close and staying long. These are not drive-by exposures of strangers; the recurring faces, the boxers especially, carry the weight of someone who kept coming back. The camera stays at the height of a person, never above, which is its own kind of respect. Dignity survives the saturation, and the people look like they know the photographer, because mostly they did.

The working takeaway is about commitment to a palette. Many photographers underexpose their ambitions, hedging colour toward the safe and the true. Rio Branco pushes past documentary neutrality into something openly interpretive, and the pictures gain authority instead of losing it. Heavy colour grading is not a modern sin invented in software; it is a painterly decision with a long pedigree, and it will carry a serious subject if the eye behind it is serious too.

Picture the edit at the end of a hard assignment, the folder of frames that came back too dark, too red, too raw for a client who booked something cleaner. This work is a permission slip for that folder. It says the difficult pictures, the ones that embarrass the brief, may be the only ones that still hold a wall in twenty years. Keep them. Print one large. Live with it a while before deciding it failed.