The haunting light of the "Nocturnes" expands the ordinary spectrum of the outdoors. Vasconcellos has created a color-drenched, nearly fluorescent photographic transformation of the good, the bad and the ugly of grimy, raw, crowded Sao Paulo, a city hardly known for its beauty and even less for historical preservation. It is Polaroid film that Vasconcellos credits with the flexibility to record these nocturnal surroundings in such a manner that organic objects and buildings seem to become one. The spareness of the images only serves to intensify the haunted and evocative qualities of his final vision.

His earlier black-and-white works from the 1980s have a Bauhaus-like air. Jewel-like
3 x 7-inch "Panoramicas," panoramic shots of black-and-white urban landscapes, typically without people, were based on a traditional, straightforward form of photography employed at the turn of the century by the Brazilian photographer Marcos Ferraz who documented Rio de Janeiro. The French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Hungarian, André Kertész, and the American, Man Ray, also have influenced Vasconcellos.