Déplacer le peuple : la photographie et les territoires du populaire dans le magazine Habitat du MASP

• Main Author: Adrian Anagnost
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Maison des Science de l'Homme 2021-05-01
• Series: Brésil(s)
• Subjects: popular; photography; modernism; race; place; Brazil
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/bresils/9309

This article examines the recognition of popular culture by Brazilian modernists, in relation to broader considerations of the popular for modernism in Latin America. This essay places discussions of the popular by Carlos Monsiváis, Marta Traba, and Jean Franco in conversation with those of Andreas Huyssen and Tom Crow, to argue that the Latin American popular has been interpreted as a function of site and embodiment, positioned between urbanity and rurality and between literacy and orality. Focusing on early 1950s issues of the Brazilian arts magazine Habitat, and exhibitions at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), this essay shows how photographic images collapsed distinctions between the popular and the modern. At the same time, however, photographs reiterated the popular as a set of rural and oral cultural forms, visualized in depictions of Black bodies set within popular architecture against the backdrop of Brazilian scenery.