The daily life of black people outside Porto Alegre’s newspaper: slopes of photojournalism in the nineteenth century

Abstract

There is a photographic production that constitutes the countercurrent of the journalistic discourse on the daily life of black people who lived in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in the 19th Century. The elements organized by the photographers in the photographic scene make possible to begin a game of visibility/invisibility between these photographies and what was said by the newspapers. On this point exists a zone of discontinuity in the huge photographic archive constituted by hundreds of portraits and landscapes. Even before the development of technical conditions of photojournalism, the photographic practices of Ferrari Brothers, Virgilio Calegari and Lunara left the clues of a photojournalistic mode in which the photographers dedicated themselves to the production of a visual and critical knowledge about their present.