Barbara Brändli Archive

Colección C&FE acquired the Barbara Brändli Archive (ABB) in 2013. The archive consists of the extensive photographic material produced by Brändli throughout her career such as negatives, slides, gelatin silver print copies, and modern copies that she carefully preserved until her death in 2011. It also includes her correspondence and personal diaries, her work equipment (cameras, tape recorders, etc.), the editorial material of her publications, a library not very extensive but with fundamental titles on Indigenous themes, and a collection of Andean textiles and other handcrafted objects gathered by her during the last decades of the twentieth century.

The Barbara Brändli Archive’s holdings facilitate research on Brändli’s trajectory as a photographer in Venezuela. Given her diverse range of interests, the archive also supports the study and analysis of a wide range of topics. These include, among others, indigenous peoples (particularly the Sanemá, Yanomami, and Ye’kwana ethnic groups); Caracas’ social and cultural life over five decades; and the natural environment and cultural traditions of the Venezuelan Andes in the late twentieth century.

In June 2024, Colección C&FE and PHotoEspaña co-produced an exhibition in CentroCentro (Madrid) titled Barbara Brändli. Poetics of Gesture, Politics of the Document as part of the collection’s responsibility to undertake the preservation and promotion of the archive.

Barbara Brändli was born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and completed her early education in Basadingen and Diessenhofen. In 1948 she moved to Geneva to study classical ballet, but from 1951 onwards she continued her professional training in Paris. In the early 1950s, she worked in the fashion industry, mostly as a mannequin for haute couture houses. Her curiosity about the human body and its movement, and her friendship with Dutch photographers Ata Kandó and Ed van der Elsken, compelled Brändli to learn photography. While living in Paris she married Venezuelan architect Augusto Tobito and they settled in Caracas in 1959.

Since she arrived in Venezuela, she concentrated exclusively on photography. In 1962 Barbara traveled with Ata Kandó to the Venezuelan Amazonia. Her early project on the Ye’kwana communities in the region focuses on their relationship with their natural environment and the ancestral ways of life. She also worked for Fundación de Danza Contemporánea, created by Grishka Holguín and Sonia Sanoja. During this period, her oeuvre on body movement reached a high point, the results of which were published in the book Duraciones visuales (1963).

During various trips to the Upper Caura and Upper Orinoco basins between 1964 and 1967, she produced extensive documentation of the Sanemá, Yanomami, and Ye’kwana. This research was partly funded by the Latin American Center of the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). After years of work and numerous setbacks, she succeeded in publishing the book Los hijos de la luna (1974), with her photographs of the Sanemá and texts by the missionary and anthropologist Daniel de Barandiarán.

With her lens focused on the relationship between human beings and their surroundings, she set about photographing the city for the photobook Sistema nervioso (1975), co-authored with Román Chalbaud (texts) and John Lange (design). The book Así, con las manos (1979) depicts the fieldwork conducted all over Venezuela to document handicraft traditions. The ancient, rural traditions of the Venezuelan Andes, threatened with disappearance by outmigration to the city, are the theme of the book Los páramos se van quedando solos (1981).

In 1994, she received the National Photography Award of Venezuela. From the 1990s onwards, she was involved in the preservation of textiles from the Mucuchíes region in the Venezuelan Andes.

Barbara Brändli left several projects unfinished when she passed away unexpectedly in Caracas in 2011.