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Pioneer Photographers of Brazil: 1840-1920
by Gilberto Ferrez and Weston Naef
Center for Inter-American Relations (680 Park Ave., New York, N.Y. 10021)/143pp./$12.50 (hb)

It’s been suggested elsewhere that most of our major studies of photographic history seem to have been written by nationalists, who (implicitly and even explicitly) maintain that the significant developments in the medium revolve around events in that historian’s home country. But if no writer has yet done the international history of photography, we have been, at least, amassing a selection of texts which might one day form a conglomerated document of events and trends worldwide. Thus, recent introductions of obscure information on countries not covered by the standard histories (Swiss: Photography in Switzerland: 1840 to today; Eastern European: serialized in History of Photography magazine, beginning with its first issue; Japanese—though in that language: The History of Japanese Photography) are liberating and laudable.

A great deal of new information on activity in a previously neglected country is introduced in Pioneer Photographers of Brazil, a new book by Gilberto Ferrez and Weston Naef. We are told, for instance, of two early daguerreotype views preserved in a Brazilian collection. These are believed to have been taken by a Father Louis Compte in early 1840—a date which, as the authors point out, would make them the oldest American photographs extant.

Ferrez and Naef strongly emphasize the influence of Emperor Dom Pedro II, Brazil’s ruler during the early years of photography—and with good reason. Just as the study of British photographic history nearly always requires reference to the influence of Queen Victoria, so photography in Brazil during the nineteenth century seems to revolve around that country’s monarch. Himself an enthusiastic amateur photographer from March 1840 on, Dom Pedro was also an important patron of photographers working in Brazil. He ordered demonstrations of new techniques, commissioned portraits of the imperial family, and purchased and preserved numerous prints. Even in his own day, Dom Pedro’s patronage was recognized as a potent source of encouragement for the country’s vital photographic community.

The greater part of the information in this book is presented to us via the reproductions. What we learn is that early Brazilian photographs are essentially the same as the commercial tourist views and portraits of celebrities, social “types,” and anthropological curiosities published in other countries, though frequently with a tropical twist. (The problem of editing a book like this, of course, is to let the criteria for selecting pictures be determined by the material itself, rather than to choose pictures which look like those already accepted as works of historical import. We should be aware that the pictures we are shown here may well be atypical of Brazilian work, even though they may correspond to North American and Western European topographical views.)

The authors also provide a detailed chronicle of the activities and contributions of a number of early Brazilian photographers whose names and images will be entirely new to nearly everyone who sees this book. All in all, it is a valuable addition to the general history of the medium. While reading it, though, a few questions about the practice of the history of photography were called to mind.

The first of these relates not only to this book, but to a great many of the photographic history monographs currently available to us. This is the phenomenon of the collector-historian.

It’s obvious that without the information provided by collectors, knowledge of our photographic past would be far less complete than it now is. The Gernsheim history, to take the most obvious example, frequently borders on a history of the Gernsheim collection—yet it is one of the few essential texts. Think, too, of the work of Andre Jammes, Van Deren Coke, William C. Darrah, and others.

But because collectors have a large stake in what work is considered historically or aesthetically significant (and therefore valuable), we are obliged to weigh carefully the statements they make. This isn’t to suggest that there are a lot of unethical photo-historians around. Even the most conscientious critics will promote work they know and love, and one is apt to know and love the work in one’s own collection more than that in other collections.

Gilberto Ferrez, one of the co-authors of Pioneer Photographers of Brazil, and, according to the foreword, the “principal source of research information,” is a collector. In fact, nearly half the photographs reproduced in this book are from his collection, and fully two-thirds of the photographers featured (including Marc Ferrez, the author’s grandfather and the artist who gets the most complete treatment in the book) are represented by at least one Ferrez-owned photo. They’re striking pictures, many of them, but still we wonder: is Ferrez so insightful and comprehensive a collector that he owns work by two-thirds of the most significant Brazilian workers? Or could it be that the artists whose images are reproduced were included partly because their work is in the author’s collection? We won’t be able to decide, of course, until we go to South America ourselves, or until second and third histories of Brazilian photography, by different authors, are published.

Another issue involves the effectiveness of traditional art history techniques, as applied to the history of photography. Weston Naef’s first book, Era of Exploration (Buffalo and New York, N.Y.: Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975), was, among other things, a rather bold attempt to derive an understanding of the concerns and aesthetic decisions of five well-known Western landscape photographers from a study of the formal elements of their pictures. In preparing that book, Naef had access to extensive bodies of work upon which to base his stylistic analyses. His methods, therefore, were intriguing, and his conclusions challenging.

In Pioneer Photographers of Brazil, however, Naef (who did most of the writing) goes too far. At one point, he tells us that the photographs of Ben. R. Mulock and Guilherme Gaensly, who worked in the same town at the same time, “tend to resemble each other’s.” This, of course, is not surprising in an era when much view photography tended to resemble much else, due to the technical and conventional limitations of the medium.

Naef goes on to attribute an unsigned photograph to Mulock because the picture “can be found, upon close examination, to bear the marks of Mulock’s style. It is taken with the camera placed near dead-center of the street, so that the receding buildings create a funnel-like effect similar to that in another view.”

“The figures,” he continues, “are blurred in an attractive manner that suggests they were deliberately shot in motion to give a sense of activity.” Of course, Naef could be describing any of thousands of photographs made about 1860. Nor are the pictures themselves significantly different from the conventional street view of the day. In fact, other images in this same book were made according to the same rules and subject to the same limitations—including one by Mulock’s fellow-Salvadorian, Gaensly.

In another instance, an unsigned photograph of a certain rock outcropping is attributed to Marc Ferrez on the basis of “the deliberate p0sing of figure and careful preservation of atmospheric qualities that occur in the same sense in a [later] print signed by Ferrez.” Again, this one-to-one stylistic comparison of nineteenth-century photographs is terribly unsatisfying. After all, many topographers posed figures in their scenes for scale and interest. And “atmospheric qualities” could hardly be avoided with plates that—like all collodion negatives—were overly sensitive to blue light.

A final point: by now we should have learned that there are really very few “firsts” in photography that can be identified with any amount of certainty, and perhaps even fewer “masterpieces” (especially among works isolated from a more complete body). And it doesn’t matter—many new subjects and techniques were adopted almost simultaneously around the world in response to changing conventions and/or technical limitations. An understanding of these social and technological forces is what we need—not the name of the person who (frequently by chance or in ignorance) first responded to them.

Naef, though, perhaps because of his art-historical bent, often seems to be trying to justify the Brazilian work on the basis of its chronological and qualitative relationship to other early photographs. This works better in some instances than in others. For example, an 1859 series of three pictures by Augusto Stahl depicting the arrival of the emperor at the Northern port of Recife may in fact prove Stahl to be “well ahead of his time in using multiple exposures to express a narrative sequence.”

A montage by Valerio Viera (The Thirty Valerios, c.1890), however, which depicts the photographer as every member of a crowd scene, hardly deserves to be called a “masterpiece.” The picture was, instead, an entertaining gimmick, perhaps made in the same spirit as the collaged scrapbooks, albums, and screens, or the montage cartes de visite and postcards of the same period. Naef seems to admit as much when he writes: “Unfortunately, [Viera’s] other work did not live up to the promise of this example.”

But whether the author’s statements hit the mark or miss it entirely, there seems to me to be little need for such attempts at rationalization and justification. Brazilian photography of the late 1800s is important for what it is: one more unique combination of standard reactions to a generation’s world view.