Mario Cravo Neto's powerful black and white photographs belie his training as a sculptor: bodies and parts of bodies and elementary objects are placed in relationships that produce pictorial metaphors of great power. The artist is concerned as a documentarist with his own homeland in Bahia in northeastern Brazil where he continues to live and work. He sees himself as part of this culture and informs his pictures with insight into the cultural, ethnic, and religious heritage of the people who live there. The pictures are imbued with the exoticism of the Afro-Brazilian culture, shamanism and the baroque sensibilities of Brazil's Portuguese culture, but in a way that remains cryptic and elliptical. The viewer observes the form without penetrating the mystery, as in Ode 1989, which points to the analogy between human and animal ways of seeing.

Like Cravo Neto, Miguel Rio Branco's subjects are the ritual aspects underlying everyday life and the universal symbols extracted from them. Rio Branco however refuses to conceal the dark side of reality and his dramatic cibachromes capture the poverty and violence that have become part of contemporary life in Brazil -- almost an accusation of the injustices that cause grief, suffering, and the despair that exists everywhere. Rio Branco is a filmmaker as well as a photographer and his images are reminiscent of cinema in their narrative qualities, yet at the same time they have the ambiguity of photography. Miguel Rio Branco lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Based on a photographic essay he did in the late 1970s on prostitutes in Salvador de Bahia, Magnum made him a correspondent in Brazil. Swift Blues, depicted here, is an example of Rio Branco's multi-panel cibachrome photographs, three of which are included in the University Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition.

n The exhibition of photographs by Miguel Rio Branco and Mario Cravo Neto runs from November 4 through December 15. For more information, call 545-3670.