Danielle Stewart

This essay analyzes the form and content of Brazilian artist Geraldo de Barros' 1951 exhibition Fotoforma. In the Fotoforma photographs, Barros employed photography as a process of construction. With photographs of construction materials as his building blocks, Barros rebuilt urban space by layering his negatives with artistic interventions , drawing attention to the tenuousness (physical and theoretical) of São Paulo's urban structure. The experimental form of Barros' oeuvre, as well as his interest in vernacular spaces, creates a place for marginalized narratives to enter the dialog of Brazilian modernization.

In an image-saturated world, what role does photography play in shaping architectural design and development? According to the historian Peter Blundell Jones, architecture since the modern period can be considered "photo-dependent, " because its ideal viewing conditions are not in situ, but isolated in photographs: framed, cropped and collaged to enhance symbolic and aesthetic value. 1 In this essay, I argue that Jones' s architectural "photo-dependency" is only half of a co-dependent relationship between photography and architecture that has developed since the former' s nascent years. Many of the first photographs taken by early experimenters with the medium featured architectural content, a pragmatic response to photography' s extended exposure times. Before it was considered an art form, photography' s utilitarian role in documenting historic structures afforded it a prominent place within the cultural dialogue. Even after exposure times decreased sufficiently to widen photography' s practical applications around the turn of the twentieth century, architectural photography remained a key genre well into the modern period. The infrastructural development of twentieth century São Paulo, Brazil offers a prime example of photography' s power to impact urban spaces and architectural style. At the beginning of the century, São Paulo was emphatically flat-and Paulistanos liked it that way. Brazil' s first skyscraper, the Neo-Renaissance Martinelli building, was built between 1929 and 1934. At 30 stories high, the building was not only the tallest in Brazil, but in all of South America. However, the Martinelli was also an elaborate exception that proved the rule of the city' s horizontality: the year of its completion was the first year that buildings of two stories or more made up at least 50% of all new construction. 2 For almost four hundred years, since its founding in 1554, São Paulo had been a sleepy village set in a swampy floodplain. Its emergence in the modern period as a global megacity was determined in part by technological innovations-like elevators and concrete construction-that allowed for its dramatic "verticalization" as skyscrapers took root in the city center, but also by the maturation of a photographic narrative that began almost a century prior. This article attempts to demonstrate the effect of circulated photographic images on São Paulo' s urban development through an examination of a particularly popular genre in the city: the comparative album. This format set historical views of the city alongside contemporary scenes taken from the same or similar vantage points in order to cultivate comparisons that illustrated how the city' s urban development manifested architecturally. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in the lead-up to the four hundredth anniversary of the city' s founding in 1954, comparative albums were an immensely popular form whose analysis in the present not only offers a visual voyage through São Paulo' s changing landscape, but also deconstructs how the narrative of architectural progress became a pillar of Paulistano identity. The central premise of comparative albums-documenting urban change over time-illustrated the city' s modernization and helped to concretize the idea of "progress" as one of its defining characteristics. By examining individual spreads within comparative photo albums and essays published over the course of seventy years, I will demonstrate how infrastructural and architectural development became the defining feature of Paulistano visual culture, and how photography helped to publicize and promote local construction. Abstract A principle feature of São Paulo photography is the predominance of comparative albums that illustrate modern progress by juxtaposing contemporary and past imagery. Within these comparative albums, paired architectural vistas became a primary means of demonstrating São Paulo's transformation into a modern city, especially as the city became increasingly "verticalized" in the mid-twentieth century. This paper employs the iconographic analysis of photographs in comparative albums and magazine spreads to show how photographic narratives of infrastructural progress helped to propel architectural trends and shift public opinion about the aesthetics and function of the city. In doing so, I demonstrate how architecture and photography operated as symbiotic practices in midcentury urban Brazil. Resumen Una característica principal de la fotografía en São Paulo es el predominio de álbumes comparativos que ilustran el progreso moderno con la yuxtaposición de imágenes contemporáneas y pasadas. Dentro de estos álbumes, las vistas arquitectónicas pareadas se convirtieron en el medio principal para demostrar la transformación de São Paulo en una ciudad moderna, especialmente cuando la ciudad empezó a hacerse cada vez más vertical, a mediados del siglo xx. Este artículo emplea el análisis iconográfico de fotografías en álbumes comparativos y revistas para mostrar cómo las narrativas fotográficas de progreso infraestructural ayudaron a impulsar las tendencias arquitectónicas y a cambiar la opinión pública sobre la estética y la función de la ciudad; con ello se demuestra que la arquitectura y la fotografía operaban como prácticas simbióticas en las zonas urbanas de Brasil a mediados de siglo.

Adrián Gorelik's La grilla y el parque: Espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires first appeared in print nearly a quarter century ago, in 1998, but the persistence of Eurocentricity within the disciplines of art and architectural history have delayed its translation and, thus far, limited its reach to primarily Latin Americanist circles. Now, thanks to the translation efforts of Natalia Majluf, it is

Course Description This course highlights twenty major documentary photography projects, many of which were published contemporaneously as photo books, produced over the course of sixty years (1932-1992) in the United States. All of the projects address to a greater or lesser degree what it means to be American, a question that has become increasingly embattled in recent years. By examining the development and evolution of documentary photography in twentiethcentury America, we will consider why the genre has been so appealing and productive for photographers, how documenting the American experience has shaped that experience, and whom the documentary mode has favored and/or maligned. We will look at historical moments and movements (the rise of progressive politics in the thirties, feminism, the Civil Rights movement, and counterculture movements) as well as important stylistic/methodological trends like New Journalism, New Documentary, and New Topographics. Students will be encouraged to understand the documentary mode historically, aesthetically, technically, and theoretically through a combination of in-class discussion and outside projects.