The Visible and the Invisibles: Photography and Social Imaginaries in Brazil
Maurício Lissovsky and Beatriz Jaguaribe
New audiovisual technologies do not just constitute a technical and material difference vis-à-vis the representations of oral and lettered cultures. They emerged in the midst of an intricate process of modernization that both undermined social hierarchies and fomented an avid dispute for a new dimension of public space. Since the nineteenth century, the popularization of the photographic camera and later the advent of cinema and television made visibility in the media an imperative of the invention of reality in mass societies. In contemporary democratic societies, mass communications constitute new public arenas for multitudes of spectator-citizens. If, according to Benedict Anderson, the sentiments of nationality prospered in the nineteenth century because of the widespread diffusion of a print culture that regimented the daily existence of an “imagined community,” in the twentieth century, the culture of the image, notably television, would play a decisive role in fabricating the time and place of our collective belonging.1
Yet if we have become overly visible, contemporary hypervisibility traces its roots to the singularly modern belief in appropriating and desire to appropriate the world by means of the gaze. The modernization of cultures and societies was linked to an increasing secularization of the invisible. Through science and technique, the domains of the invisible, the mysterious, and the magical, formerly associated with the occult, became a new disenchanted terrain virtually annexed to the visible. Since the nineteenth century, photography has exerted an important role in this unveiling of the world, because unlike other images the photographic image was soon perceived not only as a means of representing the visible world but also as a form of rendering the world visible. Ever since its origins, the photographic experience not only was associated with the past as a mode of retaining the temporal flux and the congealment of movement but also was pointed toward the future as an expectation of what the image could reveal. This characteristic was increasingly accentuated throughout the twentieth century with the advent of the culture of the instantaneous and the popularity of the snapshot.
This essay explores three sets of photographs made in different periods of Brazilian history: portraits of urban slaves made by the photographer Christiano Júnior in the mid-nineteenth century during the Second Empire; photographs of political propaganda commissioned by the Estado Novo in the early 1940s (Obra Getuliana); and contemporary images of Rio de Janeiro favela dwellers taken by the inhabitants of the favelas themselves as part of the communitarian projects of “visual inclusion.”2 While examining these photographs, we find that our attention is not only centered on the visual traces of the extinct past that resurfaces; rather, we also scan the vestiges of the future that these images distill. Their use of a visual rhetoric that defines scenarios, excludes or includes protagonists, and, most crucially, evokes pedagogies of the gaze allows us to glean signs of becoming, modes of making visible imagined modernities and communities. Despite their disparity, these sets of images organize temporal experiences in specific fashions. In the carte de visite, the testimony of continuity and of succeeding generations attests to a past exemplarily recorded for the future. In the case of the Obra Getuliana, the temporal mode insists on the inauguration of the future-inthe- present. In the photographs of social “inclusion,” the emphasis is cast on the present, and the future is maintained in suspenseful incompletion. In each set of images, therefore, a version of modernity is rendered as progress, rupture, and the right to the quotidian.
The three sets of images were chosen because of a common characteristic that permeates them. The first two sets were condemned to invisibility shortly after they were made. The portraits of slaves made by Christiano Júnior were “discovered” and published only after more than a century of oblivion. The photographs of the Obra Getuliana have remained practically unedited until now.3 The third set, the photographs of the projects of visual inclusion sponsored by nongovernmental organizations at the beginning of the twenty-first century, were conceived as a means of overcoming the invisibility that the favela communities of Rio de Janeiro supposedly suffer. While the first two sets had to await the enlightened intervention of archival researchers and historians to become newly visible, the third set makes the daily battle against its stigmatization by the mainstream media its main justification and motif. We believe that through the interplay of appearances and disappearances that envelops these photographs it is possible to observe some of the deadlocks and contradictions of the projects and dreams of modernity in Brazil.
The Carte de visite and the Imagined Society (Christiano Júnior, 1865)
Photography in the late 1800s was at the service of an empire of the visible that had laid the foundations of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this configuration, photography was heir to the enlightenment project in its untiring urge to cancel the obscurity of the world. The specific place of the bourgeois portrait in this agenda of visibility has been relatively unquestioned, and yet amid all the genres and functions undertaken by photography in the second half of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois portrait was certainly the most widely used.4 More than 90 percent of the photographs taken in this specific period are portraits, the majority in the form of the carte de visite. The worldwide diffusion of this technology and the technical procedures and aesthetic values associated with it resulted in such a homogeneous imagetic pattern that even a highly trained eye has considerable difficulty in distinguishing portraits produced in different countries and by diverse photographers. In Brazil the carte de visite enjoyed considerable popularity in the 1860s, and its use — especially by photographers outside the nation’s capital — continued unabated well into the first decade of the twentieth century.
Such prevalence and durability attest that the carte de visite was not solely a format or a technology but truly a complex photographic strategy that had profound social implications. Patented by André Disdéri in 1855, the carte de visite — given its low cost — spawned a passion for collecting, made feasible by albums readily adjusted by means of appropriate indentions that framed and supported the images. In these albums, alongside busts of relatives, families collected portraits of friends, of the Brazilian imperial family, and of national and international personalities. The album of the carte de visite comprised a visible sample of the good society; it assembled selective portraits of proper and respected bourgeois citizens. Thus all those included in the photographic album shared the dignity that emanated from their neighbors on the album pages.
Aside from his commercial sagacity and his unusual talent for advertising his merits, Disdéri was a pioneer theoretician of the photographic portrait. The crucial goal of his theory was to make noteworthy what continued to be commonplace and normative. He endowed his models with the desired prominence without disengaging them from their peers. The classic portrait artist rendered distinction, in both senses of the term. Thus the distinction that signals the elegant, honorable, and discrete character of each member of the photographed community was also coupled to the distinction that allows the viewer to perceive each individual as endowed with a specific characteristic, uniqueness, and personality.
The aim of the art portrait consisted not merely in faithfully reproducing appearances but in revealing a “moral similitude” among individuals. Disdéri believed that the successful portrait resulted from a photographic pact between the photographer and the person being depicted. Since this pact was premised on revealing the distinct character of the portrayed, the photographer’s task was to coach the person in adopting an appropriate facial expression and bodily posture. Distinction of mien was to be obtained by a careful balance between singularity and the norm. Disdéri sought therefore to portray the moral resemblance of the photographed individuals.
The cooperation of the model was seen as decisive and viewed as a reciprocally desired pact. Above all, the desired form of self-fashioning and the photographic act in the “salon of poses” could take place only after bodily postures and material props had been previously chosen from the given repertoire of the studio. In this sense, the paucity of artistic signs that translated some form of authorship was not the result of a scarcity of aesthetic resources but a necessary condition for the models to be considered the coauthors of their portraits.
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Notes
A previous version of this essay was published in the book O choque do real: Estética, mídia e cultura by Beatriz Jaguaribe (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2007). We thank the Guggenheim Foundation and the British Academy for their support.
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
- In 1930 Getúlio Vargas commanded a revolutionary uprising in Brazil against the regime of the old entrenched oligarchies of the republic. In 1937 he became the dictator of Brazil and inaugurated the Estado Novo (New State), which lasted until his fall from power in 1945.
- See the pioneering essay of Aline Lopes de Lacerda, “A ‘Obra Getuliana’ ou como as imagens comemoram o regime” (“The Works of Getúlio Vargas; or, How Images Commemorate the Regime”), Estudos históricos 7, no. 14 (1994): 241 – 63.
- For a more detailed analysis of this theme, see Maurício Lissovsky, “Guia prático das fotografias sem pressa” (“Practical Guide for Slow Photographs”), in Retratos Modernos (Modern Portraits), ed. Cláudia Beatriz Heynermann and Maria do Carmo Teixeira Rainho (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2005), 196 – 207.
