The Brazilian Photographs of Genevieve Naylor, 1940-1942
- List Price: $107.95
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Duke Univ Pr
- Publish date: 03/01/1998
Working within and around the constraints of the Brazilian dictatorship under President Vargas, the instructions of her employers, and a chronic short age of film and photographic equipment, Naylor took advantage of the freedom granted her as an employee of the United States government. Traveling widely and far beyond the fashionable neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, she conveys in her work the excitement of a foreign observer for whom all is fresh and new -- along with a sensibility schooled in the depressionera documentary photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, as well as the work of Cartier-Bresson and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Her subjects include the very rich and the very poor,black Carnival dancers, fishermen, rural peasants, workers crammed into trolleys -- ordinary Brazilians in their own setting -- rather than simple Brazilian symbols of progress as required by the dictatorship.
With Levine's text providing details of Naylor's life, perspectives on her photographs as social documents, and the historical political background of Brazil's wartime relationship with the United States, this volume, illustrated with more than one hundred of Naylor's Brazilian photographs, will interest scholars of Brazilian culture and history, photo-journalists, and students of photography.