Ciro Miguel
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 high-circulation illustrated magazines around the world.
The research narrates the material encounter of modern architecture and photojournalism as both converged into an apparatus that framed the construction of Brasília as the image of Brazil’s modernizing 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 colonial 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.
Advancing the debate about the mediatic roles of architecture and photography, the research traces networks of collaboration, modes of production, marginal characters, and archives that are generally excluded from the architectural discourse. The research focuses on the visual material produced for printed mass media from Brasília’s initial construction in 1957 until the military coup in 1964.
The research has two complementary objectives. On one hand, to understand the construction process of Brasília’s symbolic representation by photojournalism and its subsequent role in defining the critical understanding of the city. On the other, to explore how photojournalism in Brasília challenges the photographic depiction and spatiality of modern architecture, presenting it instead as impure, material, fragmentary, and contextual.
The research narrates the material encounter of modern architecture and photojournalism as both converged into an apparatus that framed the construction of Brasília as the image of Brazil’s modernizing 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 colonial 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.
Advancing the debate about the mediatic roles of architecture and photography, the research traces networks of collaboration, modes of production, marginal characters, and archives that are generally excluded from the architectural discourse. The research focuses on the visual material produced for printed mass media from Brasília’s initial construction in 1957 until the military coup in 1964.
The research has two complementary objectives. On one hand, to understand the construction process of Brasília’s symbolic representation by photojournalism and its subsequent role in defining the critical understanding of the city. On the other, to explore how photojournalism in Brasília challenges the photographic depiction and spatiality of modern architecture, presenting it instead as impure, material, fragmentary, and contextual.
