Machine generated contents note: Introduction -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1 -- Corpse: The Nation in a Decomposing Portrait -- Chapter 2 -- Scars: Humanitarianism and the Colonial Point of View -- Chapter 3 -- Debris: The Indigenous Past in an Ethnographer's Dream -- Chapter 4 -- Shadows: The Amazonian Worker and the Modernist Traveler -- Epilogue: Fire -- Bibliography -- Notes -- Index.
Summary:
"Traces of the Unseen situates photography's role in documenting the destruction wrought by infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole at the turn of the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher. "A richly illustrated examination of photography as a technology for documenting, creating, and understanding the processes of modernization in turn-of-the-century Brazil and the Amazon Photography at the turn of the twentieth century was not only a product of modernity but also an increasingly available medium to chronicle the processes of modernization. Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America situates photography's role in documenting the destruction wrought by infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multimedia assemblages, Carolina Sa Carvalho explores how this visual evidence of violence was framed, captioned, cropped, and circulated. As she explains, this photographic creation and circulation generated a pedagogy of the gaze with which increasingly connected urban audiences were taught what and how to see: viewers learned to interpret the traces of violence captured in these images within the larger context of modernization.Traces of the Unseen draws on works by Flavio de Barros, Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Mario de Andrade to situate an unruly photographic body at the center of modernity, in all its disputed meanings. Moreover, Sa Carvalho locates historically specific practices of seeing within the geopolitical peripheries of capitalism. What emerges is a consideration of photography as a technology through which modern aspirations, moral inclinations, imagined futures, and lost pasts were represented, critiqued, and mourned"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.