Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil: Rethinking Art's Histories

In locating this study within the wider context of studies of modern visual culture, this book seeks to shift the emphasis of Eurocentric histories of photography and film on the diffusion of a Western technology and its local reception by modernist pioneers. In its place, Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil aims to develop a more nuanced account of the geographies of Brazilian modernity by recognizing the distinctiveness of its cultural forms, its social heterogeneity and the complexity of the relations between the local, the national and the global. Through a range of richly-worked studies, covering not only the cities of Rio de Janeiro and S o Paulo, but also the Amazon rainforest, the savannas of southern Mato Grosso, and the coffee plantations in the outback of S o Paulo, the book presents a distinctive perspective on the spatial and visual history of Brazilian modernity. Its findings are of significance not only to Brazilianists, but also to historians of film and photography more generally.