Advisor: Ana Luiza Nobre
Dissertation: Pungent Chronicles: O Rio de Janeiro da “Reforma Passos” (1902-1906) na fotografia de Augusto Malta
Defense date: 25/10/2018
Abstract
The object of this thesis is the image of the city of Rio de Janeiro produced
during the so-called “Reforma Passos” (1902-1906), by the photographer Augusto
Malta (1864-1957). The research is centered on the relation between the image of
the city produced by Malta and the urban-political project of transformation of the
city instituted by the Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos (1836-1913). How the city of
Rio de Janeiro is “seen” in the photograph of Malta, and to what extent its images
have supported a vision of the city linked to a project of modernization, and to what
extent they intended that vision. Through the exercise of reading photographic
images, based on what Roland Barthes calls the “vague phenomenology” and the
concept of punctum, I intended to work the inscription of photography in the
historical culture. Not as an illustration of a textual narrative, but as a “value” and
a “key of access”, to re-introduce new questions to Malta motivated by the recent
urban transformations experienced by the city in the present.