Fotografia e história : leituras e releituras do espaço urbano / Uberlândia - 1940-2008

Abstract

A place of production and reproduction, the city in itself is by excellence a space where modernity is debated and represented. The various speeches on the city present fragments of an unreachable total. Photography, one of the possibilities of representation, is only a fragment in other speech fragments or starting point in the tentative to understand questions left by other subjects. Interpreting city representations is to interpret them together with their producing subjects. In this study a photographical representation of the city is interpreted tied to the ideal of beauty as an illustration of modernity and of progress that materialize in an imperfect shape in aerial photos. In these photos, the subject is dissolved or disappears in the monumentality of urban form. However the city represented in photos leaves other prints that compose a rupture in its beauty, another possibility of a city that could be interpreted from the prints collected in a sparse way from the media, between the lines in the papers which go with the daily life and violence. The collected prints in the Newspaper permit the looking away of the eye to the great plain, the aerial, the particularity of photographical production of a single subject lost in the urban space This whole group of images makes it possible for us to question the different cities that put the totality of the urban chess together and the characteristics beyond modernity. Characteristics that we seek to investigate in reviews written about the city and from which we seek to build an interpretation of the current day. This proposal is availed by writings of historians, but also by visual anthropologists and which seek to atribute to photography a tool for the research which it intends to critique.