Historical photographs offer visual evidence that not only reveals nuances of the fabric of past society but offers insight into the ways photographers crafted their pictures seeking, consciously or subconsciously, to influence the ways that their subjects would be interpreted. The volume under review is a translated version of one of the most important published collections of early photographs of Brazil compiled to date. Stella de Sá Rego has done a fine job translating Gilberto Ferrez’s text, and the University of New Mexico Press has produced a handsome edition of the landmark study. Photographers came to Brazil and to the rest of Latin America remarkably early, starting in the early 1840s, and left a rich legacy of pictorial images whose ultimate destiny varied widely. Some were distributed by the thousands and tens of thousands domestically as well as abroad to collectors. Others remained in obscure archives or in private holdings. Most of the photographs produced by the hundreds of professional photographers who wandered the countryside and clustered in towns and cities have never been examined by scholars; they remained relegated over the generations to the category of curiosities.
The book is divided into fifteen sections. Fourteen are dedicated to photographs of each of imperial Brazil’s provinces; the fifteenth treats the work of Marc Ferrez (1843-1923), one of the most accomplished and prolific of the region’s nineteenth-century photographers. The text, by Marc Ferrez’s grandson, Brazil’s major collector and photographic historian, is workmanlike. It describes the images and the photographic context in which they were made, but it offers little analysis of the deeper meaning of the scenes described by the photographs themselves. How rich the images are! There is a daguerreotype of a review of troops in front of the Imperial Palace, the first daguerreotype made in South America, dated January 1840, only months after Daguerre’s process was announced to the world in Paris. There are photographs of urban and rural life, slaves, landscapes, plantations, civic processions, railroads, mines, citizens at leisure, carnival, aborigines, industrial and engineering achievements, and natural wonders. These scenes stand as invaluable resource materials not only to illustrate visually the history of the past century but to permit the researcher to probe for nuances, to examine daily life, and to offer insight into material culture, posing conventions, and, always, the values and agendas of the photographers themselves.
There were few amateur photographers in the nineteenth century, and professionals worked for clients whom they had to please with images that reflected their patrons’ values and presuppositions about society, order, and progress. The photographs reproduced in this volume illustrate that world view. Most of them present on the surface a static but carefully choreographed depiction of Brazil as dynamic, progressive, stable, and triumphant. It remains for the historian to work with these images, to read them, and to penetrate their posed façades.
