Sandra Cattaneo Adorno’s Águas de Ouro takes Rio de Janeiro as its subject, but treats the city less as a location to be documented than as a condition of light. Published by Radius Books as a 160-page hardcover measuring 10.5 by 12.75 inches, the book gathers photographs that move between street observation and abstract, lyrical composition. What holds them together is the body: isolated, transformed by the strong golden light, set against the natural beauty of Rio’s beaches, and granted a symbolic dimension by that contrast.
The publisher describes the pictures as capturing people and moments with visual maturity and acuity while also evoking something quintessential about the city and, beneath it, something a little darker — the bittersweet yearning Brazilians call saudade. The book does not illustrate that feeling so much as let it surface through glare, reflection, and the body’s partial disappearance into brightness. Adorno’s figures retain their specificity as individuals, yet the light keeps pulling them toward something less nameable: the invisible levels of poetry and magic the publisher invokes.
As her second monograph with Radius Books, Águas de Ouro occupies a settled position within an ongoing project rather than standing as an isolated statement. Its combination of street photography’s immediacy with a formally abstract treatment of the human figure gives it a distinct place among photobooks about Rio, and among photobooks that use the beach as a site of visual inquiry rather than picturesque setting. Adorno is credited with the photography and text.
For collectors, the interest is concrete: a major Brazilian subject, a lyrical and abstract handling of the human body in golden light, and a substantial hardcover — 160 pages at 10.5 by 12.75 inches — from a publisher whose list has consistently supported serious photographic work. Águas de Ouro rewards attention not because of any external claim but because of what it does within the book: it holds observation and invention in productive tension, and it treats Rio’s beach culture as a subject with depth, contradiction, and its own darker undertow.
