The Power of Photography in Brazil

Did you know Brazil’s second emperor, Emperor Dom Pedro II, is considered the country’s first photographer?

In 1839 a group of Europeans arrived in Rio de Janeiro with the first commercially successful photographic process—the daguerreotype. When the method was demonstrated before the teenaged emperor-in-waiting, Pedro II, in 1840, it was love at first sight, and Brazil’s dynamic and enduring relationship with the medium began.

“When Pedro II became emperor at 15 years old, he simultaneously rose to power alongside the rising medium of photography in Brazil,” said Sérgio Burgi, head of photography at the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS), a Brazilian art and cultural center. The next century would be a time of modernization, from the end of slavery to the complete urban reform of Rio, and these developments would be captured by the camera.

A new digital atlas supported by the Getty Foundation, imagineRio, helps users witness this transformation by mapping more than 3,000 digitized historical photographs from the IMS. This website takes users back through time to understand the history of photography and to see the development, displacement, and urbanization of Rio.

Pedro II was an advocate of budding photographers throughout his 58-year reign and provided financial support to one of Brazil’s most notable photographers, Marc Ferrez. Ferrez’s early images largely feature Brazil’s many waterfalls, mountains, jungles, and man-made feats of engineering, such as railroads, bridges, and urban buildings.

Coffee Plantations, Propaganda, and Slavery

Ferrez’s work later expanded beyond landscapes to include photographs of enslaved people. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, and his photographs are visual records of its final years.

Ferrez was paid to produce a series of photographs of enslaved people working on plantations by the Centro da Lavoura e do Comércio (CLC), an institution founded to create and disseminate propaganda to expand Brazil’s coffee exports to international consumers. His creations for CLC simultaneously advertised a glamorized version of Brazil and its exports to a worldwide audience while endorsing the system of slavery and downplaying its harmful effects. Ferrez continued to photograph other scenes of slavery that are equally devoid of violence and seem almost harmonious in nature.

Later in his career, Ferrez invented a special camera and tripod apparatus for use on a ship’s deck, which absorbed the movement of waves and produced images with a steady, unblurred horizon line. Because of this achievement, Pedro II proclaimed him the official photographer of the imperial navy of Brazil.

From “Unhealthy City” to “Tropical Paris”

Another Brazilian political leader entranced by the power of photography was Francisco Pereira Passos, mayor of Rio from 1902 to 1906. He hired Augusto Malta as the city’s official photographer and instructed him to document an urban reform campaign called Bota-Abaixo (Bring It Down), a major redevelopment and gentrification effort that significantly altered the landscape of Rio.

Passos’s campaign was intended to restore the city’s status as a thriving metropolis, as it had earned a biased reputation as an “unhealthy city,” particularly when compared to majorly redeveloped ones like Paris. Malta’s photographs of Bota-Abaixo captured the process of sanitizing, renovating, and demolishing buildings like tenements, rooming houses, and inns. Some of his most well-known images show the demolition of the Morro do Castelo (Castle Hill), one of the sites where the city of Rio was founded in the 16th century and home to historical landmarks such as colonial fortresses and Jesuit buildings.

“Malta’s role of documenting Bota-Abaixo was to serve the government and help push propaganda that sold a ‘tropical Paris’ idea of Rio,” said Martim Passos, project manager for imagineRio. “His photographs really showcase how dramatically Rio was transformed through central avenue renovations and the erection of new, beautiful buildings. Malta’s work effectively established him as the first official ‘photojournalist’ in Brazil.”

“Malta dove into the profession of photography, dedicating the rest of his life to advancing the practice,” said Burgi. “Although he began his career working for the government, his photographs and their scale of transformation over the years made him a living memory of Rio for historians and the general public alike.”

Malta remained Rio’s official photographer for over 30 years, capturing historic events, from the National Exposition of 1908 to the inauguration of the statue of Christ the Redeemer in 1931, as well as everyday scenes of city life.

A Glimpse of Contemporary Brazil

In addition to imagineRio, IMS recently commissioned a book with the contemporary artist Robert Polidori, who captured large-format photographs of Rio in celebration of the city’s 450th anniversary in 2015. The book compares Ferrez’s 19th-century prints with Polidori’s 21st-century images, demonstrating the enduring influence of early Brazilian photographers.

The city’s favelas are a primary subject among Polidori’s modern-day photographs, revealing overcrowded neighborhoods that have experienced dramatic population growth. The images expose tensions between Rio’s natural and urban environment, largely due to prolonged government neglect and a lack of investment in infrastructure.