Nocturna: uma perceção suburbana

Abstract

This project work reports, through a set of photographic images, a suburban reality, which was titled Nocturna: a suburban perception. Briefly, it begins with a description of the history of photography, based on Walter Benjamin's theoretical foundations on the various phases of the aura, with particular focus on photography. From his analysis of Eugène Atget's work, it appears that the concept of aura is associated with something more than the character of a unique and irreproachable object, situating the Benjamin´s reflections in the historical and sociological context in which they were written, proposing their critical evaluation. With the central question about the status of photography, André Rouillé's considerations on the boundaries where a photograph as a document transcends and invades the artistic field are explored. It describes the technical evolution of photography, which led to the pictorialist movement and its possible appreciation as art. Because photography has an intrinsic documentary character, it was used by the various sciences that emerged with the industrialization of the nineteenth century, including ethnography, to which particular attention is devoted, where its method of research can be compared with the way of acting of the flanêur. In ethnographic research, there is usually the need to “cut out” a given reality due to the multiplicity of subjects that can be studied, which refers to the work of August Sander, a photographer who inserts within the scope of artistic photography the notion of typology and his methodology was later adopted by Bernd and Hilla Becher in their photographic series (typologies). The context in which photography develops its singularities, along with economic growth and the expansion of cities, is also emphasized, translated into a new social structure, with an irreversible impact on the behavior of modern man, creating the foundations of consumer society, which would extend to the present day. In this sense, cities become a grand stage of theater, where each individual is simultaneously an actor and spectator before the other.Thus, the project Nocturna: a suburban perception is based on these issues, leaving the observer free to interpret their images as well as the consistency of their integration within their descriptive and conceptual part.