{"id":69601,"date":"2007-10-20T16:22:15","date_gmt":"2007-10-20T18:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=69601"},"modified":"2013-01-03T14:27:07","modified_gmt":"2013-01-03T16:27:07","slug":"portrait-in-black-and-white-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/portrait-in-black-and-white-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Portrait in black and white"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published in February 2007<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"REPRODUCTION\/MARC FERREZ, BASKET MAKER, C. 1899<\/span>If, referring to slavery, Castro Alves asks God, in O Navio Negreiro [The Slave Ship], \u201cwhether so much horror in the eyes of the heavens is true\u201d, it is no surprise that sociologist Muniz Sodr\u00e9, in the article A Genealogy of the Images of Racism, uses a horror figure to illustrate his view\u00a0 of the Negro point of view of our society: \u201cDracula is not reflected in the mirror, hence, he is imageless. He is the opposite of the identity normalized by the petit-bourgeois culture. In the society of the image (a near-anagram of magic), of the devices of sight, the subject only exists if it appears in the \u201cmirror\u201d, that is, if it has the\u00a0 sociocultural conditions to have a publicly recognizable image\u201d. It is worth recalling that the Count, as well as photography, are \u201cchildren\u201d of the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe perception of those days about photography is that it is not merely a form of \u2018representing\u2019 the world, but of \u201cmaking the world visible\u2019\u201d, analyzes Maur\u00edcio Lissovsky, a photography historian from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In the mid-1860s, in Brazil, the photographic portrait had become an object of desire for whites and blacks. \u201cIn the case of these latter, whether born free or freedmen, by having themselves portrayed like the whites, in the European fashion and with codes and behaviors borrowed from the other, it was an attempt to tread a path within a demanding racist society\u201d, observes Sandra Koutsoukos, the author of the doctoral thesis \u201cIn the Photographer\u2019s Studio: representation and self-representation of free, emancipated and enslaved blacks in Brazil in the second half of the 19th<\/sup> century\u201d, defended in October, at Unicamp, under the orientation of Iara Lis Schiavinatto.<\/p>\n

The research \u201cunveils the invisible\u201d present in images of blacks with top hats and their wives with parasols, wet nurses and their white \u201cchildren\u201d, as well as the controversial \u201ctypes of blacks\u201d, as in the images by the photographer Christiano J\u00fanior, who advertised himself in the Lammert Almanac as the owner of \u201ca varied collection of costumes and types of blacks, something very appropriate for those leaving for\u00a0 Europe\u201d. Exhibiting half-naked black men and women (adored by the racist ethnologists), cataloged by their African origin, or in scenes produced in the studio of their work on the streets and on the farms, the images called the attention of Sandra, who saw that it was \u201cnecessary to look at what was being framed in the photos, as well as to discover what remained outside\u201d. But \u201cDracula\u201d does not appear in the mirror. So, what is there to see?<\/p>\n

After all, as anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha observes, in `Slave Look`, being looked at, \u201cin a portrait, one can be seen and one can offer oneself to be seen, alternatives connected to the relationship between\u00a0 the portrayed and\u00a0 the portrayer: if the portrait of the master is a form of a visiting card, the portrait of the slave is a postcard, where the slave is seen, but is\u00a0 not offering himself to be seen\u201d. In one, we have the preservation of the image of a singular worthy person, someone who, by ordering a photograph, allows himself to be known, and is splashed over the paper as he would like to be seen, as he sees himself in the mirror; in the other, a generic picturesque character, the professor goes on. \u201cIn my studio, I discovered that, in spite of being taken to the photographer\u2019s studio and posing, whether at work or as a backdrop for his master, the slave and the freedman \u201coffered themselves to be seen\u201d and \u201cshowed\u201d themselves, and that they were, perhaps as much as the whites who posed for their photos in private studios, the subjects of those portraits\u201d, is Sandra\u2019s analysis. For the researcher, in almost all the images, there are the eyes staring at the lens, directly at the photographer, giving the image a voice. \u201cMany were not\u00a0 intimidated before the weird machine and would give their personal contribution by means of their expression, the suffering look that looks at\u00a0 us and seems to tell\u00a0 stories. The luxury or the staging did not disguise their condition of being a slave or a freedman. If the slave\u2019s body was a property, his personality was not.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPhotography is a marvelous art, an art that excites the most astute minds. And an art that can be practiced by any imbecile\u201d, complained the great French portraitist Nadar. Posterity\u2019s good fortune. If it took a long time to be discovered (only in 1839), it reached Brazil quickly, the following year, brought by Abbot Compte, a pupil of Louis Daguerre, the inventor of photography. Before Rio, the Frenchman was said to have been to\u00a0 Bahia, the pioneering spirit of which is well presented in the recently-launched Photography in Bahia, organized by Aristides Alves, and which brings 215 images taken, from the mid-19th<\/sup> century to 2006, by 107 professionals from Bahia and abroad. (Another excellent source is O negro na fotografia brasileira do s\u00e9culo XIX [The Black in Brazilian Photography of the 19th<\/sup> Century], by G. Ermakoff, from Casa Editorial, 306 pages, R$ 130.) Incidentally, until the arrival of photography, the eye of the eighteen hundreds was a foreign eye, linked to the tradition of Franz Post, and, later on, of Frenchmen, Germans and Swiss who painted the everyday life of the tropical court, always preferring the exotic side of Indians or Blacks\u00a0 in a constant state of happiness and strolling\u00a0 through the streets of Rio, as we see in Debret and Rugendas. The Daguerreotype was expensive and required lengthy poses of up to 60 minutes.<\/p>\n

Illiterates<\/strong>
\nIn 1854, Andr\u00e9 Disd\u00e9ri, of France, created a process for small-sized portraits (9.5 cm by 6 cm), prepared on albuminated paper, which, being cheap and quick to shoot, were a revolution in a country of illiterates with few possessions who would like to see themselves immortalized like the noble owners of the portraits. The cost of a dozen cartes de visite<\/em>, as they were called, was the same as that of a single daguerreotype and could be offered as a souvenir to friends and relatives to produce family albums. \u201cIt was the democratization of the self-image for less favored social groups. With the carte de visite, <\/em>photography was to become a technique available to all, an object of desire and status, a merchandise for exchange\u201d, Sandra notes. The newspapers were full of advertisements for\u00a0 studios that sought\u00a0\u00a0 clientele according to their prices and\u00a0 their ability to \u201cgive nobility\u201d to the photographed, whether by their technique or by the trappings that they had in the salon which would adorn the surroundings of the person photographed. \u201cPhotography gives the poor black the opportunity to distance himself from reality, to project himself according to an idealized image, to represent himself. The need to record\u00a0 social climbing requires the assimilation of the current codes. Hence the repetition and the uniformity\u00a0 of the poses and accessories in the portraits.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"reproduction\/pierre verger, portrait, 1950's <\/span>The studio, says the professor, acts as a dressing room and a stage, where the photographer is the director and the client, even though\u00a0 participating in the construction of his scene, the character. A photo, even at the cost of going without\u00a0 items important for survival, was\u00a0 visual proof for them, for friends and relatives that the fight was worthwhile. \u201cThe moment required that, besides being free, the person born free or emancipated should appear free to the others, using\u00a0 symbols\u00a0 to indicate their\u00a0 condition.\u201d Details like wearing shoes were indicative of the new status of freedom. Gilberto Freyre, in Sobrados e Mucambos [The Mansions and the Shanties], tells how blacks, \u201cdressed in the European fashion\u201d, were attacked and ridiculed in the streets for their \u201cdaring\u201d. Likewise, many slaves were taken to the studio to play as extras in their masters\u2019 portraits and, their humiliation (\u201cbut not their attitude\u201d, the researcher stresses), ensured\u00a0 that the master\u2019s power was recorded. The staged photos, with blacks reproducing their labor in the studio, were souvenirs (whose sterile scenic organization, Sandra notes, was trying\u00a0 to pass off the idea of \u201ccivilized slavery\u201d) and ethnographic objects, made in order to sustain racist theories.<\/p>\n

In these, \u201cevidence\u201d was sought of the inferiority of the Blacks and likewise they acted as a basis to countersign the ideal of \u201ccivilized slavery\u201d, the researcher notes. \u201cIn spite of the sterility and the order portrayed, the condition of being a slave was not hidden; rather, its essence was exposed.\u201d There was also a market for photos of wet nurses, bringing to their bosom the white child that they were breastfeeding. \u201cIn this kind of photo, they tried to pass on an idea of harmony and affection, in a period in which the use of wet nurses was being condemned by medicine\u201d, Sandra observes.<\/p>\n

Moods<\/strong>
\nIn an advertisement in the Jornal do Commercio [Trade Journal], of 1875, a defense was made of Nestl\u00e9 Cream of Wheat, \u201cthe true wet nurse\u201d, which, the ad claimed,` would free the child from contagion by ailments inoculated from\u00a0 the alien milk, corrupted by the bad mood of any wet nurse\u201d. Modernity called for changes, but mothers were reluctant to give up the privilege of \u201cusing\u201d the Negress to feed their children. The photos were an attempt to \u201chold back\u201d the clock of the new times. In these photos, the researcher reckons, the force of expression in the look of the photographed, obliged to dress herself with forced luxury, is even more striking.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are reminders that, for there to be a black wet nurse, there has been a black baby that was often separated from its mother to enable her\u00a0 to bring up the master\u2019s child.\u201d The invisible becomes visible. \u201cThe social use of the slavery of the African peoples created in Brazil an asthetic for the useful exterior of the Black\u2019s body. The slave masters, as professionals in the business, knew\u00a0 the details of their servants teeth better than that of their daughters\u2019, as happens with present-day breeders of thoroughbred horses. Even today we are not free of certain averted looks\u201d, analyzed the anthropologist from Unicamp, Carlos Rodrigues Brand\u00e3o, in his article The Black Look. \u201cIn newspapers and magazines, the blacks are more body than face, more type, and even more performance than person. In a country where\u00a0 there are millions of \u2018pure\u2019 blacks , it is the white face, whatever it is, that is seen. The blacks and mixed races are almost all the country\u2019s criminals, for almost all the photographs of criminals are of mixed race and blacks.\u201d In Brazil, the image of the Black as a physical\u00a0 machine is strong, something complex in a country that has learnt to despise manual labor. Blacks are the ones who work, the ones who are sensual (even when revealed as sportsmen), the ones that love parties, observes Paulo Bernardo Vaz, a professor from the Social Communication Department of the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the author of a study about the image of the Black.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe visual flow that shows the Black suffering, taking a beating, robbing, or exhibiting his sensual body re-updates socio-historically constructed meanings that suggest crystallizations that typify the Black in a form that does not favor positive self-esteem. It is the external look that shapes the Black into a pejorative representation that can affect his identity construction. After all, who wants to be identified with a subject that lives in suffering?\u201d For Vaz, the communication media offers the Black the contradictory opportunity to be someone else and not himself. \u201cThe \u2018other\u2019 represents the ghostlike\u00a0 threat of dividing the space from which we talk and think, it is the fear of losing one\u2019s own space. Primitive fear, comparable to children\u2019s nightmares. The \u2018other\u2019 ends up becoming Dracula, without a legitimate image\u201d, analyses\u00a0 Muniz Sodr\u00e9. Transylvania, like Haiti, may also be here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Image of the Brazilian Negro was forged with the arrival of photography","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[],"coauthors":[117],"class_list":["post-69601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69601"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=69601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}