Selected peer-reviewed articles and books:
From the Favela to the Slum: Race, Nation, and Realism in the Photographs of Gordon Parks and Henri Ballot
Accepted to Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture
This article revisits the polemical 1961 confrontation between Life and O Cruzeiro magazines, which revolved around photo essays by North American photographer Gordon Parks of a Rio de Janeiro favela and by French-Brazilian photographer Henri Ballot of a New York City slum.
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Largely interpreted by scholars as a Cold War confrontation over the role of U.S. intervention in Latin American economies and urban development projects, the polemic also hinged on a key set of concerns about the nature of photographic realism and the representation of race. Both Parks and Ballot exchanged accusations of staging and fabrication, which I demonstrate to reflect the two photographers’ use of techniques to produce, as well as unsettle, conventional representations of race as projected onto skin color and urban spaces cast as “other” to modernity and its aspirations to whiteness. In developing close visual and spatial interpretations of a photographic archive often glossed over as “ideological,” I show how Parks and Ballot worked both within and against the grain of two magazines that served as dominant arbiters of a strain of mid-twentieth-century mass media aesthetics indebted to documentary realism. In doing so, I reveal the polemic as a key moment of mutual exchange between Brazil and the United States, challenging conventional readings of the relative fluidity or fixedness of each country’s respective racial systems.
Published in Revista Cine Documental
This essay considers the relationship between the documentary production of Video nas Aldeias, a collaboration initiated in 1987 between Brazilian filmmakers and anthropologists and various Amazonian Indigenous groups, and the law.
It traces legal and political developments in Brazil since the ratification of the current constitution in 1988, which enshrined the right to indigenous land demarcation, arguing that the project gives cinematic form to the possibilities and impases of the law with respect to indigenous populations, and more specifically, to the only partially accomplished recognition of their lands. Seen in this light, the project not only intervenes in the conventions of ethnographic film, it also more broadly challenges the established functions of legal concepts of territory and evidence. Through detailed analysis of films from distinct periods in the trajectory of the project, the essay shows how documentary cinema supplements the law in a necessary fashion while containing its own limits as a tool of advocacy. The growing hostility towards the indigenous question in Brazilian legal and political spheres, however, demonstrates the necessity of cultural forms capable both of insertion into such spheres and of maintaining a critical distance from them.
Book co-authored with Verónica Flom
(Buenos Aires: Cosmocosa)
