Shadows in So Paulo

re they gangsters? Are they bankers? There are certain

photographs that seem to have been pulled out of the world
of dreams. Men on a Rooftop, by the Swiss photographer Ren
Burri (19332014), is one such picture.The photograph, taken
in So Paulo in 1960, shows four men on a rooftop, seen from
the vantage point of an even higher building. Far below them,
stark in black and white, are tramlines and cars, and tiny pedestrians so perfectly matched with their long shadows that they
look like miniaturized sculptures by Giacometti.
Im not sure when my interest in Men on a Rooftop became an
obsession.Through the years it gained a hold on my imagination
until it came to stand as one of the handful of pictures that truly
convey the oneiric possibilities of street photography. The celebrated Iranian photojournalist Abbas, who knew Burri well
(they were both members of Magnum Photos), described Men
on a Rooftop to me as vintage Ren: superb form, no political or
social dimension. Abbas zeros in on the formal perfection of
the image, but Im not sure I agree that it lacks a social dimension.To me, it literally portrays the levels of social stratification
and the enormous gap between those above and those below.
A great photo comes about through a combination of readiness, chance, and mystery. Gabriel Garca Mrquez, once asked

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whom the best reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude was, responded with a story: A Russian friend met a lady, a very old
lady, who was copying the whole book out by hand, right to the
last line. My friend asked her why she was doing it, and the lady
replied, Because I want to find out who is really mad, the author or me, and the only way to find out is to rewrite the book.
I find it hard to imagine a better reader than that lady. Like the
lady in Garca Mrquezs story, I thought some act of repetition
would clarify things. And so I went to So Paulo in March 2015,
looking for Ren Burri.
I was there once before, three years earlier, and I had been
impressed by the citys thrumming energy, especially along the
stateliest of its avenues, the Avenida Paulista. This was not the
clichd Brazil of soccer, sand, and samba. From a height in any
central district of So Paulo, what you see is an incessancy of
high-rises, as though someone had invented the high-rise and
then forgotten to stop. This city of work and hard edges, I
found, was the Brazil I preferred, and I somehow convinced
myself that Burris photograph, so keen in its evocation of capital, must have been taken on Avenida Paulista.
Shortly after arriving in the city, I went to visit a friend, the
curator Thyago Nogueira, in his beautiful corner office on the
fourteenth floor of a building on Paulista. There were great
views of the avenue, but in neither direction could I see a correspondence with any aspect of Burris picture.Where were the
four silvery tram tracks glinting in the slanting sun? What about
the steep canyon created by the tall buildings facing one another? And I couldnt find any building that matched the one on
which the men were walking. Thyago began to mention other
major roads in the city. Perhaps I wanted Rua da Consolao or
Avenida da Liberdade? Or was Burris view from the Martinelli

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Building? As he threw out names, it dawned on me that I was

lost: Id come all this way, and all I had was a city, a year, a photographers name.
In Magnums New York office, theres a library print of Men
on a Rooftop. On the reverse of the picture are stamps and scribbles: Burris name, the words Brazil and businessmen, and
several five-digit numbers in different hands. It was a lovely artifact, but it told me nothing about exactly where in the city the
picture had been made. Nor did an interview Burri gave late in
life, in which he simply said, Whenever there was a high-rise
building, I was climbing up and knocked at the door and said,
Can I take a picture? So Paulo is full of high-rises, and they
all have doors. I tried a few.The view from the roof of the sinuous thirty-eight-floor Oscar Niemeyerdesigned Copan building yielded no clues. The restaurant near the top of the
forty-six-floor Edifcio Itlia offered a thrilling panorama, but I
saw nothing that related to Burris photograph.
There had been a terrible drought at the beginning of the
year, but it was finally raining in So Paulo. I sat in my hotel
room, brooding. During a brief lull in the downpour, a woman
dressed in black and wearing high heels walked across the roof
of the building on the other side of the street, smoking a cigarette.
Four days into my trip, Thyago emailed with news. A friend
of his thought that Burris picture was made from the top of a
building that once belonged to the Bank of the State of So
Paulo. That building, still informally called the Banespo, was
completed in 1947, and was for a while the tallest in Brazil. I
went up with a small group of tourists. It was mid-morning,
the rain had stopped; we were limited to five minutes. From
the viewing platform, thirty-six floors above the sprawling city,

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the vista was bright. I took photos in all directions and realized,
with a sinking feeling, that I was again in the wrong place.Then
the five minutes were up, and our small group had to descend.
A dead end. I wrote to thank Thyago anyway, and I asked
other friends in the city about Burris picture, but few of them
knew it. The search had begun to take on some of the dream
logic of the photograph itself. I was frustrated but also vaguely
amused, as though I were suspended in the first half of an uncompleted joke. I asked the concierge. I asked the taxi drivers
who took me around. None of them could recognize the photograph. It seemed that I would leave So Paulo empty-handed.
In any case, the city had grown so fast and so hectically: perhaps
the building the men walked on, or the one from which Burri
took his picture, had been altered or demolished.
Then Thyago wrote back. His friend, he said, insisted that it
had to be the Banespo. It could be no other. But Id seen the
view with my own eyes.What had I missed? It was a Friday, the
day before the end of my vacation. And that was when I remembered a curious story that Burri told about the photograph. In
those days, according to Burri, Henri Cartier-Bresson limited
his fellow photographers to lenses from 35 millimeters to 90
millimeters. Burri had surreptitiously gone longer while shooting in So Paulo, to 180 millimeters. I never told him! he said.
At that point, I broke loose from my mentor. When you shoot
at such an extended focal length, theres a great deal more compression between the middle and far distances. The canyons
created by So Paulos high-rises seem even more vertiginous.
The angle of view is also severely narrowed, cutting out much
of what the eye sees on the periphery of vision. Perhaps using
the wrong lens was getting in my way? Id taken a 50-millimeter
lens with me. I now borrowed a longer lens from Thyago; it was

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only 85 millimeters, not ideal, but closer. Then I got in a taxi

and went to the Banespo.
It was late afternoon, and by now the rains were torrential.
The city was a gray blur.The buildings shone with wet.The time
limit at the top of the building was the same as before, five minutes, and, in the open-air viewing platform, I got drenched. I
set my eye to the cameras viewfinder and looked northwest.
Suddenly, everything clicked into place, as in the final moves of
a jigsaw. I saw Burris view. To the right was the building the
men had walked on. How could I have missed it before? It was
(I later discovered) the Edifcio do Banco do Brasil. What I
hadnt seen in Burris photo was that the roof the men were
walking on was not the buildings summit: the building had a
stacked design, and a further set of floors rose just out of the
shot. To my left and far below, meanwhile, was Avenida So
Joo, slightly changed from 1960the tramlines were gone
but certainly recognizable in its rain-slicked state. The avenue
was full of cars, buses, and pedestrians. The rain kept coming
down, and my five minutes were up. But the mission had been
accomplished.
The photograph isnt what was photographed, its something else, Garry Winogrand once said. Its about transformation. The photographic image is a fiction created by a
combination of lenses, cameras, film, pixels, color (or its absence), time of day, season. When Im moved by something, I
want to literally put myself in its place, the better to understand
what was transformed. This interests me as a writer and as a
photographer: How do raw materials become something else,
something worth keeping? Those four guys just came from nowhere, and went to nowhere, Burri said of the men in his photograph.The photograph he made of them came from nowhere

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and went everywhere. My seeing his point of view and taking a

picture from the same spot fifty-five years later did not solve
the mystery. But in discovering all that can be known about a
work of art, what cannot be known is honored even more. We
come right up to the edge, and can go no farther.

CREDIT LINE: Excerpted from KNOWN AND STRANGE

THINGS by Teju Cole. Copyright 2016 by Teju Cole.
Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in
writing from the publisher. This essay was originally published
in The New York Times Magazine.

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