Barricades: on a photograph by Augusto Malta

Abstract

By the exercise of reading a photographic image of the city of Rio de Janeiro, taken by Augusto Malta in 1908, in the context of the “Passos Urban Renovation”, we sought to work on the inscription of photography in historical culture — not as an illustration of a textual narrative, but as an “access key” to reposition questions to the   photographer based on the tension between what his image portrays and what it effectively “allows to be seen”. The unequivocal materiality of photography as an opposition to the historical idealism constructed by official discourse.
Keywords: city; photography; memory.