Pomerode: Cristina de Middel and Brazil’s “Little Germany”

This fall, as part of “A World in Color,” an ongoing project between Magnum, Fujifilm and MPP to start digitizing the 650,000 color slides from the Magnum archive in Paris, Thomas Dworzak and Cristina de Middel were given carte blanche to curate a selection of images made by Magnum photographers in Germany over the second half of the 20th century. 

Inspired by her findings in the archive, De Middel turned her attention to the strange and unexpected town of Pomerode in southern Brazil. Using a Fujifilm GFX 100S, she creates a counterpart to her selection from the archive to explore themes of German identity and performance, a legacy left by the Pomeranian immigrants who founded the town. 

Nossa pequena Alemanha (Our little Germany) 

Cristina de Middel: Pomerode is a small town in southern Brazil, often described — almost proudly — as the most German city in the country. Founded by Pomeranian immigrants in the 19th century, it has become a careful stage set of half-timbered houses, bratwurst, Alpine hats, and folk dances rehearsed under a tropical sun. What survives here is not the original culture, but a more recognizable, export-friendly version of Bavarian identity — preserved like a souvenir, stylized and spotless.

Living in Brazil, I’m used to traveling without leaving the country. But Pomerode felt like crossing into a parallel fiction — one where the story of origin has been rehearsed so many times it became real. This is the kind of terrain where stereotypes thrive. They start as simplifications, repeat themselves into familiarity, and eventually stand in for truth. Photography has always played a willing accomplice in that process. It offers just enough reality to make a fiction stick.

While working on this project, I was also invited to dig into the Magnum Color archive — specifically, a body of work made in Germany that had never been scanned or shown. As a member of the agency, opening those boxes felt strangely personal. The names on the slide sheets weren’t just legendary photographers — they were colleagues, old friends, ghosts with whom I now share a roof. There’s something quietly beautiful about being part of the moment when their images are finally seen. Photographs that had been waiting decades for their turn to exist.

This exhibition brings those fragments into dialogue with my own images from Pomerode — two parallel versions of Germany, filtered through different eyes, different decades, different continents. One speaks of legacy turned folklore; the other, of history suspended in a slide sheet. Somewhere between them, identity becomes a loop: performed, inherited, reimagined.

Discover more from“A World in Color” here.