The second book Gilvan Barreto made, put together by Tempo d’Imagem, is the result of a journey through the sertão in the summer of 2013, at the height of the worst drought in sixty years. It brings back portraits of the backlanders and the contradictions of the region: the relations between water and drought, abundance and scarcity, photography and literature. The struggle between man and nature, the concrete and the imagined, runs through the pictures. The idea came from the seventieth anniversary of Pedra do Sono, the first book of the Pernambucan poet João Cabral de Melo Neto, but the work took on a life of its own. "I had no interest in making a photographic diary," the author says. "I wasn’t after a road book with notes in a little pad, a logbook full of chance events." He chose his routes deliberately and looked for what he wanted to show of the sertão. "I am not after the decisive moment, I turned down the snapshot. The book had to be a reflection on this immersion in the backlands rather than a record of the experience." He explains the title too: "Whatever the title may suggest, it is not the rising sun that matters here, but the sun we avoid, the sun that dries and destroys things out there — the Monster of the Sertão, as J. Borges titled a woodcut. A photography that works in the heavy shadows of that sun. This is a book of contrasts." A text by João Cabral de Melo Neto was given by the poet’s family, and the sun on the cover was drawn by the writer Ariano Suassuna, who also joined the conversations about the sertão with the team that made the book.