The Architecture of Brasília  through the Lens of Photojournalism, 1956-1960

At the end of the 1950s, Brasília was a mass media event. The bold plan of relocating the capital to a new city in Brazil’s hinterland captivated not only architectural media outlets but also illustrated magazines around the world.

The research narrates the material encounter of modernist architecture and photojournalism as both converged into an apparatus that framed the construction of Brasília as the image of Brazil’s ambitious development project in the postwar years. Supported by new technologies, media organizations, and the State, photojournalism in its many forms composed a mediatized representation of the city’s building process, offering the public a dramatization of modernism's expansion to frontier territories in Brazil. The photographic material produced for illustrated magazines promoted images of a new imaginary nation and, at the same time, conveyed intrinsic acts of violence, dissonances, and microhistories of this massive urban-architectural endeavor.