Marcel Gautherot on Módulo Magazine - Photographic essays, images of Brazil: from material and immaterial Culture to Architecture

Abstract

This article is about photographs of Marcel Gautherot published in Módulo magazine, a Review of Architecture and Visual Arts, created by Oscar Niemeyer in 1955, when he was already internationally known as an architect. The purpose of the text is to raise methodological questions around the hiatus on historiography concerning periodicals in this country, and specially to show the role of Módulo and its photographic reports on affirmation and diffusion of modern Brazilian architecture, also considering the anonymity of photographs on architectural publications. The periodical demonstrates that for the men of that generation, the new architecture was connected to a nationalist view on identity, manifested by the visual arts, the historical heritage and the representations of material and immaterial culture - vernacular architecture, folklore, capoeira, popular art (like figureheads on boats), and other subjects that are the same on Gautherot's collection, appearing since the first issues of the magazine until the 60's. The analysis specially highlights photographs of the construction of Brasília, main topic of the programmatic rhetoric of the periodical.