The article explores contradictions and convergences between a medium (photography) and the image of the Brazilian Indian from the perspective of the history of Brazilian photography. During the first of three distinct moments, the image of the Indian was of someone exotic, in contradiction with the modern meaning of photography under the Second Empire. During the second moment, in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, the boundaries between ethnography and Brazil as a nation were blurred, as exemplified by the Rondon Commission/Indian Protection Bureau's Research Section (Serviço de Proteção ao Índio) and Brazil's modern photojournalism, as found in the magazine Cruzeiro. During the third moment, the expressions of an ethno-poetry present in the photographs of Cláudia Andujar can be seen to blend medium and image as an ethnographic space in contemporary art.
photography; Brazilian Indian; visual anthropology; photojournalism; Claudia Andujar (1931-)
