From Áustria to Paraná: the images of Hans Kopp trajectory, the first photographer from Rolândia (PR)

Abstract

This paper salvages the image trajectory of the first photographer of Rolandia (PR), the Austrian Hans Kopp who came to Brazil after he’s fought in the First World War. He built his life on the North of Paraná, where he registered with photos the birth of the new cities. The paper is a retrospective of Hans Kopp’s life and work, from his birth in 1899, in Austria, to his death in July of 1991, in Rolandia. It proposes a salvage of the memory in the photography and uses it to find out about latent stories about Kopp family and the cities of Rolandia and Londrina. His history and the memory was literally put away in a bottom of a trunk, whose belonged to his decendents. The
family’s permission to use their datas was essencial to succeed in the propose of this paper. The methods used were: review of literature, documental search,
oral history and photografy analysis. The review of literature was divided into two ways: photography and memory and history of the North of Paraná.
The documental search was done with documents available in the history museum of Rolandia and in the Kopp’s family heritage. The oral history was used to do some interviews and the photography analysis to understand better the documents collected during the search. In this way, the line used to guide this paper was works of the researcher Boris Kossoy, with his theoretical and aesthetic studies focused in the photography expression and in the application of the iconographia as a source of historical and social search and the memory conservation.