Natalia Brizuela "Photography, Melancholy and the Conception of Brazilian Nationalism" March 8, 2004

Natalia Brizuela, from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, outlined an interesting argument about the relationship between photography, Romantic literature, and the development of Brazilian nationalism in a talk at the Center for Latin American Studies on March 8, 2004.

Photography, Romanticism and Nationalism in Brazil
Sarah Schoellkopf

Shaping the identity of a nation requires not only viable political and economic systems; an infrastructure of the imaginary must be created as well. What, then, was the 19th century invention we call “Brazil”? According to Natalia Brizuela, the birth of Brazil’s identity coincided with the beginning of photography and the Romanticist literary movement, all of which were constructed as a form of “absence.”

Pedro II, the Emperor Photographer

On January 21, 1840, a 14-year-old boy attended a private demonstration in Rio de Janeiro by Father Louis Compte, recently arrived from France, on the daguerreotype. Father Compte showed his marvelous machine in all the Latin American ports where he had landed: Salvador de Bahia, Montevideo, Santiago de Chile and Rio. The demonstration undoubtedly thrilled its viewers, though surely “scaring, scarring, and haunting” them as well. The young boy was transfixed. Two months later, he received his own daguerreotype from France, thus becoming the first owner of the new invention in all of the Americas. Though there are no records of his first images, Brizuela suggested that we could imagine his trial and error as he learned about the intricacies of the chemical processes and of light on sensitized surfaces.

In 1851, this same boy — now a man — would give Brazilian-based photographers salaries for their work. His interest in photography, in “indexing,” would become paramount for his nation: a year and a half after the daguerreotype demonstration, in July 1841, the boy had been crowned Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil. What he most likely saw in the lens was something that would never exist again, “an object of loss and of absence,” said Brizuela. Brazil would thus also be constructed as an absence. The science of shaping a nation and the science of photography would be intrinsically related. Romanticism, as a Brazilian literary movement, would also interact with the national project.

According to Brizuela, Pedro II was not only an avid photographer but also a collector intent on “housing and helping to bring to light a national culture that could, in turn, bring to life a national feeling.” He wanted to find the shape, image and sentiment of Brazil, thus forging a national identity “that would be both revealed and constructed, revealed through construction.” What, then, was Brazil? What did Pedro II see? It is as if Pedro II wanted to show his countrymen photos of their identity, leaving the verbal account to the Romantic writers, Brizuela suggested. The intellectual elite would thus describe and “imagine” Brazil. In this quest, a group of intellectuals from Rio founded, in 1838, the Instituto Historico e Geografico Brasileiro (IHGB), modeled after the Parisian Institut Historique, founded four years earlier.

From its very beginning, the precocious Pedro served as the Instituto’s protector. In 1839, he offered the group a room in the Royal Palace for their weekly meetings. In 1840, he began to attend the Instituto’s weekly meetings. It has been said that his attendance at cabinet meetings was not nearly as frequent as his presence at the Instituto. From within this organization, the Brazilian Romantic movement would emerge.

The IHGB became a subject of obsession for some of the luminaries of the Brazilian state. Brizuela suggests that this connection between the members’ professions as senators, business leaders and lawyers from the “Supreme Tribunal” and the Instituto’s project is explicit. They wanted to reconstruct an “official History of the Nation,” decide upon “facts” and provide a unified past for all Brazilians. In other words, the Instituto began “by producing images of this unknown nation so as to compose a narrative of belonging from those images,” thereby creating a sort of new cartography of the Empire. Directing the entire endeavor was Pedro II, the great collector of “all the saudades and suspiros and writings of light.”

Loss and Absence

The role of photography was hotly debated in the 19th century: early documents on photography, published during this time, discussed whether the images were created by man or by nature. Did the agency belong to man? Or did nature inscribe herself onto the photographic plates? In that light, the first discussion in Brazil of the European discovery of photography occurred several months before the arrival of the daguerreotype in Rio. On March 1, 1839, the Jornal do Comércio related how such an incredible invention could enrich a traveler’s possibilities of capturing images, “without the aid of a palette or pencil.” But, as Brizuela suggested, for a person to utilize any sort of photographic equipment at this time would involve “many pounds of clumsiness” rather than the convenience of modern instant photography. Moreover, where would one travel? Within Brazil itself? At the end of the 1840s, this new type of artist — the photographer, who often was a recent immigrant — began to capture images of Brazilian cities as well as the immense territories dividing them. “The homeland was in fact the faraway land.” These artists provided the images that would haunt the projects of the Instituto. Photography was attempting “to make present what is absent … make visible the invisible.”

For Brizuela, photography is both a loss and a gain. The gain is what we are left with, the piece of paper that provides the observer with a memory. But the loss is that same memory, now unattainable. The photograph both preserves and destroys the past, because the observer can no longer return to that moment. The “click” of the shutter marks a small death, an absence.

Writing and Melancholy

Brazil’s Romantic poets of the 19th century, like the photographers, also wanted to capture the new nation. Both of these groups of “proto-observers” emerged as a “unified body” at the same time, the late 1830s and early 1840s. Brizuela cited the poetry of Goncalves de Magalhaes (1811-82) expressing this call to look and to index. His poem “Invocação a Saudade” tells of the deep longing provoked by the Portuguese word “saudade.” This melancholy that both gives and takes, that creates a desire for what is missing. Magalhaes wrote the poem before a visit to France in 1833. Without even leaving, he was already longing for Brazil, for home. But because the first Brazilian Romantic texts were written in Europe, their authors fashioned an idealized, heroic and “true” Brazil out of notions of the indigenous communities that had existed before the Portuguese colonial enterprise. They were also imagining that which no longer existed and, perhaps, never existed.

Thus, the saudade/nostalgia experienced by the Romantic writers and the inability to capture the nation by the photographers mingled with a nationalist desire of identity during the 19th century in Brazil. The project of nation-building predicated on this loss came to an end when Brazil became a Republic in 1889, and Pedro II and his family sailed away to Europe, “leaving behind his personal collections so that the new Republic could have its ruins of souvenirs.” The loss and melancholy was over. Writers such as Machado de Assis and Euclides da Cunha would write of a different Brazil, one that now accepted its identity and was no longer a “specter of nothing.” Brazil’s nationalist desire would chart a different course in the 20th century as well, finally fulfilling a different destiny.

Natalia Brizuela is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. She gave her presentation “Photography, Melancholy, and the Conception of Brazilian Nationalism” at CLAS on March 8, 2004.

Sarah Schoellkopf is a graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Professor Brizuela