Mapping Brazil - Photography: Rio de Janeiro, former capital of photography

Rio de Janeiro, capital of photography during the Empire and in the first decades of the Republic
On 16 January 1840, daguerreotypy reached Rio de Janeiro in the form of pictures taken at Largo do Paço by Louis Compte, abbot on the French corvette, Oriental. From then on, the visual representation of the urban landscape of what was then the capital of the Empire of Brazil and its inhabitants underwent a profound change. In the first 15 years, the daguerreotype process was used primarily for taking portraits in photographic studios set up in the city. As of the 1850s, the development of new photographic processes, especially collodion glass negatives and albumen prints, enabled the expansion of photography and its multiple applications. The memory of urban landscapes and architectural features dating back to the colonial period are preserved in the photographs from the 1850s and 1860s taken by Augusto Stahl, Revert Henry Klumb, Victor Frond, Georges Leuzinger, Marc Ferrez and others, who documented different cities, towns and regions of the country.

The landscape is an indelible presence in the history and representation of Brazil as a whole and Rio de Janeiro in particular. Even in the earliest reports of Guanabara Bay, its iconic geographical features were already present. Travelling artists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had already portrayed its singular localization, nestled between the sea and the mountains since its founding on 1 March 1565, in drawings, paintings and prints. The pioneering photographers, including Klumb, Frond, Stahl and Leuzinger, produced extensive visual records of Rio de Janeiro and its landscape between 1856 and 1875. In so doing they produced the first photographic representations of the city’s urban landscape.

Swiss Georges Leuzinger, who had set up premises in 1840 on Rua do Ouvidor 36, where he worked as a publisher, printer and bookbinder, conceived and executed a great many projects. He printed lithographs of Rio de Janeiro, and had views of the city printed in Paris at Maison Lemercier in the 1850s, many of which were produced from daguerreotypes. In the late 1860s he set up a photographic workshop from which he produced a regular supply of photographs of Rio de Janeiro’s many and diverse districts and streets. In 1867 he sent his assistant, a German photographer called Albert Frisch, to the Amazon, where he produced some pioneering images of the region.

Revert Henry Klumb, originally from France, moved to Brazil in 1852 or thereabouts, where he settled in Rio de Janeiro. On 2 and 3 November 1855 he published an advertisement in Jornal do Commercio newspaper about his activities as a photographer and daguerreotypist. As of 1856, he also used wet collodion negatives to produce salt and albumen prints of portraits, views and stereoscopic vistas. In 1866 he moved to Petrópolis, where he produced some outstanding photographs of the landscape, which were exhibited there in 1875.

Frenchman Augusto Stahl, a nineteenth century master of landscape and portrait photography, arrived in Recife on 31 December 1853. In the two or so decades that he remained active in Brazil, he produced what is arguably the most expressive body of photographic work from the period. The images from the 1850s when he recorded the outskirts of Recife and the nearby sugar plantations show the clear influence of European landscape photography on his work, as expounded by Roger Fenton, Camille Silvy and others from England and France. Stahl exhibited photographs taken in Brazil at the French Photographic Society Exhibition in Paris in 1859. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1862, where he took portraits, produced photo paintings and documented the capital city’s urban landscape, as well as that of surrounding areas, including the nearby towns of Niterói and Petrópolis.

Jean Victor Frond, a French photographer from Victor Hugo’s circle, documented Rio de Janeiro in photographs between 1857 and 1862, which he included in his published work, Brazil pittoresco.

Marc Ferrez was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1843, four years after the daguerreotype process was officially presented to the world and three years after it was taken to the city, in January 1840. Member of a select group of pioneers who developed and explored the potential of landscape photography in Brazil from the 1850s to the 1870s, he created the most significant photographic representation of the country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The only person in Brazil in the nineteenth century to live exclusively off documentary and landscape photography for over 50 years, Ferrez garnered increasing prestige amongst the city’s photographers from the mid-1870s onwards. Frond had left Rio in 1862, and neither Klumb nor Stahl had worked in the city since the beginning of the 1870s. When Casa Leuzinger shut down its photographic activities in 1875, the only landscape photographer of note still working in the imperial capital was Marc Ferrez. He systematically documented the Rio cityscape, where he lived and produced most of his photographic work, which was strongly influenced by the stunning natural landscape of the city and surrounding areas. He travelled around the outskirts of the city, up its mountains and around the bay, building up a personal and poetic vision of the urban space at the boundary where the natural and built worlds meet.

Ferrez’s output from the mid-1870s to early 1880s is marked by a constant investment in large-scale cameras, like the Brandon panoramic camera, operating at the formal and technological cutting edge of the day. He took up commissions in other parts of the country, serving as the official photographer for the Geological Commission of the Empire, the Imperial Navy and the railways. He raised the use of large equipment to the height of its virtuosic expression in the series of photographs from 1903 to 1906 that record the civil works for Avenida Central and the buildings associated with the major urban redevelopment project in Rio de Janeiro, brought together in Álbum da Avenida Central. Towards the end of his life, Ferrez devoted himself to coloured stereoscopic photography, using plates made by the Lumière brothers and the process called autochrome. Ferrez’s legacy to Brazilian and global photography will always be regarded as his extensive body of work depicting Brazil during the imperial period in the second half of the nineteenth century and the republican years in the early twentieth century.

Born in Alagoas in 1864 and resident in Rio de Janeiro as of 1888, Augusto Cezar de Malta Campos was appointed photographer for the General Directorate of Works and Roads of the capital city, Rio de Janeiro, in 1903. In his work as a photographer for the local authority throughout the administration of Mayor Pereira Passos he carefully documented all the streets whose layout would be changed as part of the ambitious plan to transform the whole of the centre of the city. The aim was to produce records that would support the negotiations for compensation to be provided by the local government during the civil works on Avenida Central.

Alongside his work as a photographer employed by the city hall, Malta documented the projects of the Rio de Janeiro Tramway, Light and Power Company Limited, better known as Light, which started operating in the city in 1905. Malta’s photographs on 24cm x 30cm glass negatives from 1906 and 1907, produced on the commission of Light and the municipal authority, document a variety of aspects of the capital of the republic. It is such an important series of works from Malta’s output because it was the first effort to produce comprehensive visual records of the city at a time when it was undergoing such major changes as those caused by the alterations to Avenida Central and by the work of Light itself, as it installed electric tramways and new public street lighting.

The very language of photography also changed significantly at the time. As the light-sensitivity of photographic materials improved, both photojournalism, of which Malta was a precursor, and amateur photography became increasingly common. With the emergence of illustrated magazines and the use of photography in the family environment, photographs started to be a common presence in people’s everyday lives, expanding the repertoire of images and intensity of visual communication in society.

Based in Rio de Janeiro, Guilherme Santos (1871-1966) produced an extensive body of work using stereoscopy, documenting the city and other parts of the country, which he brought out in theme-based collections with a strong documentary and journalistic bent. An amateur photographer keen on three-dimensional effects, he recorded the habits and daily lives of the residents of Rio, its landscape and social and political events. Rodrigues & Co. also brought out sizeable collections on the city, and Marc Ferrez, together with his sons Júlio and Luciano, also left a very rich legacy of black-and-white and colour stereoscopic images.

As demonstrated by the research data on nineteenth century Brazilian photography gathered by historian Boris Kossoy in his Dicionário histórico-fotográfico brasileiro, published by Instituto Moreira Salles, “in the nineteenth century, there were the greatest number of establishments. It was therefore the most important centre for photographic activity in the country.”

In the 1840s, the years when daguerreotypy reached Brazil, 21 of the 34 users of the technique in the country worked in Rio de Janeiro. The following decade, this ratio fell from 62% to 50%. When Ferrez began his professional activities in the 1860s, it was 47%. By the 1870s, 40% of the country’s working photographers advertised their services in the country’s capital. This prominence gradually waned, such that by the 1880s – the last decade of the imperial period – around a third of professional photographers were still working there. By the 1890s, with the beginning of the republican era, Rio boasted just 23% of all photographers. More were now working in the state of São Paulo in a trend that continued into the twentieth century, especially with the economic growth brought about mainly by the coffee industry and the population and industrial growth of that city.

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