Published for the centenary of abolition, this collection of 77 lucid carte-de-visite images of Carioca bondsmen between 1864 and 1866 offers stunning visual information about the face of urban slavery in Brazil. Four brief essays precede the full-size photographic reproductions: a biography of the photographer, José Cristiano de Freiras Henriques Júnior, by Paulo Cesar de Azevedo and Maurício Lissovsky; and short discussions of the photographs by Moniz Sodré, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Jacob Gorender. These disappoint; they are speculative, not based either on research or on careful content analysis. The contribution of the book lies in the exquisite photographs themselves, the most detailed images of slave men and women—taken from five separate collections in Brazil—ever published in a single volume.
The captionless cartes overflow with visual data. Young black women stand elegantly before the lens in handsome dress, at ease, posed in the same manner as members of the upper class. A teenage girl wears a headcover that evokes Islamic Africa. Fruit sellers carry trays laden with wares and infants strapped tightly to their backs. Women’s and men’s faces carry tribal sears, presumably applied before the slaves were transported to the New World.
A lissome young woman who is not visibly self-conscious stands naked above the waist, adorned with simple jewelry. The men’s faces are more weathered and harsh, lined with furrows. None wear shoes; their feet are heavily callused. Many bear the implements of their trade, or carry large baskets, or wooden barrels. Their clothes are tattered. A food seller wears a hand-me-down formal frock coat rent with holes, covering trousers in shreds. Purchasers—always well-to-do collectors who paid ten times the monthly wage of a free laborer for ten sets of cardboard-backed cartes of “types,” as they were called commercially—presumably would have thought this comical.
Youths practice the martial art of capoieira. Musicians play. An exquisite photograph captures a young slave woman grinding manioc in front of her rural hut. A few male slaves are nattily attired, but always shoeless; one man with a deformed leg wears a wooden prosthesis and supports himself with a cane. Men wearing fez-like hats carry umbrellas in the streets. A man walks with four large wooden chairs balanced on his head. Barbers cut hair; butchers cut meat; vendors sell flowers; a man sells apples which, according to Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, were imported from the United States. A childlike gold panner, in a photograph obviously not taken in Rio de Janeiro, stands in only a loincloth; what appear possibly to be leg irons lie behind his feet against the wall. Another image, of two bearded men carrying long rifles and dressed in white, desertlike military garb, could only have been taken in Africa. The inclusion of these two photographs is puzzling, and unfortunately the editors provide no explanations.
The images haunt us because of their great detail and their humanity. We know little about the photographer, Christiano Júnior, except that he photographed clients from all walks of life; after a dozen years in Rio de Janeiro he moved his studio to Buenos Aires, where he became known for his scrapbooks of travel views of the rural countryside. He won a gold medal at the Córdoba Exposition of 1871 and at the Scientific Exposition of Buenos Aires in 1876. His sight failing, he retired to Asunción, where he tried to sustain himself hand-coloring photographic portraits. He died in poverty in 1902, remembered in his obituary in Caras y Caretas as a man famous “in his time” for his photographs of high porteño society. His career was not unlike most of the studio photographers who tended to move from place to place throughout Latin America in the middle and late nineteenth century. The difference is that his portraits of slaves and the indigent preserved their dignity even as they met marketplace-imposed conventions.
