| Summary: | In an office of Rio de Janeiro’s correction center, founded in 1850, one of the convicts turned his fellow prisoners into a new type of models. These portraits mark the early use of photography as a tool for criminal identification in Brazil. They can be found in the files of the Doña Theresa Christina Collection of the Manuscripts Section in the National Library. This photographic experience, which was supervised by Luis Vianna de Almeida Valle―who was both the warden and the doctor of the prison―complemented the practice of resorting to anthropology to classify the prisoners and determine their personalities and hereditary antecedents through the use of medical and psychological profiles. Particularly striking is a set of photographs of slaves, identified by their origins. Those portraits of prisoners became symbols of technology once exhibited at the World Fair in Philadelphia in 1876. Today, they are a historical archive, used as a starting point to study the prison as a place of punishment in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
|
|---|
