Olhares em construção: modos de vida representados nas fotorreportagens de o cruzeiro

Abstract

This research investigates how photography, present in photo reportages made by Jean Manzon and José Medeiros in the magazine O Cruzeiro, contributed to representation of urban ways of life in Brazil during the passage of the 1940s to 1950s. I seek to understand which concepts were highlighted through the production of these photographers in the period 1947-1951. Therefore, 11 reportages published during the chosen period were analyzed. Based on the Science and Technology Studies, I propose that the ways of seeing are essential components of photographic technological system. Because the private and collective ways of interpreting the world in which photographers and editors are embedded are crystallized in photos during production. The association of photography to the press, especially in the early twentieth century, expanded the access to representations of cities, people and lifestyles from places that many people would not be able to see with their own eyes. O Cruzeiro was a weekly illustrated magazine started in 1928. In the 1940s, inspired by European magazines, it became a modernization's vector of Brazilian photojournalism. With thematic variety and national distribution, O Cruzeiro reached a wide audience and became an important media in Brazil. I understand that photography influences the relationship between people and the world when the perception of objects, places, concepts is mediated by representations. Throughout the analysis was observed that the reportages build concepts by representations using dichotomies as femininity and masculinity, leisure and work, civilized and savage, lower and upper classes, among others. However, these themes are articulated to each other: for example, femininity or masculinity representations are crossed by social class, generation and ethnicity markers. The choices made by photographers and magazine, during photographic production and circulation, work like proposals of life models when representations are repeated over the years.