Ver para registrar: narrativas visuais das habitantes da urbe de São Paulo pelas lentes de Hildegard Rosenthal (1940)

Abstract

This dissertation aims to understand how Hildegard Rosenthal built visual narratives about women from São Paulo in the 1940s. To achieve this goal, the objective is to analyze how Hildegard Rosenthal observed and portrayed women from São Paulo in the decade of 1940 in the most diverse situations – working on the city streets, using the urban spaces, enjoying beauty services and even their own self-portraits, taking into consideration gender and migration relations that can be involved. To achieve that 38 photographs produced by Rosenthal during the 1940s as well as an interview given by her, in 1981, to the Museum de Imagem e Som were analyzed. Methodologically, to complete the analysis of the images, I decided the analysis in two moments: “tecnical photographic processes” and “interpretative photographic processes”. To understand Hildegard Rosenthal’s interview, I use Oral History, to thus relate her discourse, understandings and questions to her own biography and photographic processes. During the development of the dissertation, it was possible to understand how the foreign gaze – both male as well as female – marked the photographic culture of São Paulo in the first half of the 20th Century, due to the fact that the foreign photographers were responsible for the introduction of “modern photography in the country”, which brought new angles, scenes and themes to the Brazilian images. In relation to Hildegard Rosenthal, I concluded that her identify was formed through her process of migration between Germany, France and Brazil, and that her visual narratives are the result of these movements e gazes to the other, in Brazilian lands, especially in São Paulo. This, I understand that Hildegard Rosenthal built visual narratives of women in São Paulo in the 1940s, seeking to identify the most varied roles women could perform in the society of the time, including criticisms, ideals and ideas the photographer understood to mean to be a woman in São Paulo in the specified period.