Sunday morning with the Industar 61 in a Fuji XT-1

Walking through São Paulo with a camera is always a mix of some surprises and great urban scenery. In downtown and its surroundings, this microcosm of a city with about 20 million people offers both incredible architectural landscapes and scenes of neglect of historical heritage and security problems, but also good ideas on how to occupy the public space.

There, a place that has been the target of public discussions is the Elevado Presidente João Goulart, better known as Minhocão, which 3.4 kilometers of extension connect the central zone of the capital to neighborhoods of the west zone and was built near 1971 as a solution for the increasing traffic. Currently, there are ongoing debates about a possible demolition of the entire structure, a concrete scar which critics accuse of promoting the devaluation of the region, presenting risks for being without preventive maintenance and of having become an architectural aberration that causes more problems than it solves.

However, not everything is concrete, garbage and insecurity there. The road itself and its surroundings are also a meeting point with leisure and art in the midst of the gray metropolis. Since 1989, Minhocão has been closed to vehicles on Sundays and, from then on, it began to be occupied by pedestrians and cyclists. Street artists also converged there and today the road corridor is flanked by immense graffiti murals on the buildings that surround it. More recently, in addition to the access being opened to pedestrians and cyclists, the place maintains stations with leisure activities and rest areas.

The entire extension of Minhocão and what is around it offer an excellent opportunity for street photography. Whether it is for the symmetry in the facades of the buildings or the sinuous forms of the road itself or the way the light moves throughout the day, photographing along the road is an excellent visual exercise.

The images that make up this article were made during a Sunday morning in autumn. Access to Minhocão was through Rua da Consolação, another historic street in the city of São Paulo, where it is possible to get off at the Mackenzie subway station and from there walk for about 500 meters to one of the ends of the road structure. There is no need to rush when walking along its more than three kilometers as the number of buildings and the possibilities of capturing images in its surroundings are many.

The architecture of the buildings deserves special attention. There are constructions that date from the beginning of the 20th century to newly built works in an effort to revitalize the region and attract new residents. The facades – and consequently the windows – are quite close to the road. Even offering the chance of good images, some caution and sensitivity are needed to avoid an unnecessary and undue invasion of the residents’ privacy.

Both because of the diversity of the facades and the graffiti murals, the universe of colors in Minhocão and around it is quite varied. For that Sunday walk, the option was to use the Industar 61 53mm f2.8, a small manual lens manufactured in the Soviet Union for Fed cameras, called by some the “Russian Leica”. The lens has an m39 mount, screw, and was adapted for a Fuji XT-1.

The combination between both is quite interesting. Although it was designed for rangefinder cameras, the lens is quite easy to use on the Fuji. Small and light, combined with the X-Trans II sensor, it yields some interesting colors, with little saturation. The focus, although not perfect, is good enough for good images. Perhaps partly because of this, the photos gain a slightly more grainy texture, which proved interesting for the visual standard of concrete and cement of the place. With the Fuji’s crop factor, the Industar 61 becomes approximately an 80mm, which helps to photograph at medium distances.

The result were images that show possible cutouts of a very wide region, whose possibilities for photography range from the structure of Minhocão itself to the buildings that flank it and people who circulate both on its main road and on the streets below it.

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