Quando se olha para o escuro: a Maceió de Luis Lavenère Wanderley através dos seus negativos de vidro

Abstract

From the technical conservation work done on each of the 492 glass negatives from the alagoan collection Luiz Lavenère Wanderley during a scientific initiation research entitled “Luis Lavenère: collector of images from Maceió”, it was possible to observe each image and to begin to know the portrait of the city in the early twentieth century through the look of it. Lavenère (1868 - 1966) was, besides photographer, journalist and writer. When diving in the collection, it is noticed that he walks around the city and captures the views to publish them in some books and postcards – means of communication and dissemination of the features of the most widespread city at the time that became an important instrument in the “construction collective image of the city “. More than this, He makes an ample record of what went to Maceió of his time, framing beyond the streets and public buildings, the events and the daily life of the city. This is because only part of this record (29 unique photos) was published and marketed as a postcard. The majority, which makes up the collection object of the research, remained for more than 50 years deposited in the Public Archive of Alagoas and was only rescued during the aforementioned research, but remains unknown. From this fact a question arises: how the city of Maceió is constructed by the look of Lavenère in the beginning of century XX, beyond the image commercialized in the postcards? This dissertation aimed to construct a narrative, at the same time as a new set of images within the collection, having the unpublished photographs of Lavenère as main source of research, deepening in the questions that comprise the photographer’s and author’s eyes, besides ways of seeing the city and the image. It is an interpretative research to be constructed from the look at the primary object, the negative, coupled with the action of the concepts of punctum (Barthes, 1980), rhizome (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1995) and two atlases: mnemosyne de Warburg (Didi-Huberman, 2013) and that of Borges’s impossible (Foucault, 2007), considering that the author’s immersion in the Lavenère collection built a unique way of seeing the city. Research in other documentary supports also composed the work: books, newspapers and magazines. At the end of it reveals another way of seeing Maceio from the negative of the image, a mode that is latent in Lavenere’s photographs and reveals itself to the deep and long look at them. As a consequence, the work allowed the deepening of the ways of looking at the city and the image, which are shown from the photographer’s perspective, besides contributing to an important aspect in the formation of the architect and urbanist: the perception about the city, and about how it presents itself.